Search Results for ‘people’
Being a good political scientist traveling to Indonesia, the second day after my arrival I dutifully bought a book on Indonesian politics. Because during the past few months I have been working on analysing the voting behaviour in the Lisbon referendum in Ireland my mind is set on electoral studies a bit more again - something I had not seriously worked on since leaving Leiden - so I bought Indonesian Electoral Behaviour: a statistical perspective by Ananta Aris, Evi N. Arifin & Leo Suryadinata. Now you should know that in this particular bookstore, most books are wrapped, so I had no way of looking inside the book. It looked like a thick book (480 pp), it was slightly pricey (well, just slightly), so, hey, it must be good, right? The disappointment that followed lead to this post …
In the first place, the authors appear to have a somewhat limited knowledge of statistics. They make remarks like “It should be noted that the Indonesian population, aged 20 and above, was 119 million in 1999. However, Liddle and Mujani’s study was based on a small sample of 2,500 individuals, and the regression analysis was based on an even smaller number of 1,100 individuals.” (p. 5) 1000 respondents is not at all that small - depending on how many different subgroups you are studying - and more importantly, the population size of Indonesia has absolutely nothing to do with this! The sample size is important for drawing statistical inferences, not the population size - a widely known fact.
I now read well over half the book, and all I have seen so far is raw data. And not even about elections - it is the independent variables that are extensively discussed. And nothing about measurement, or reliability, or quality, or relevance for the problem at hand - no, a pure and simple description of the actual data. In region X so many people live in cities, while, remarkably, in region Y only so many people live in cities. *yawn* And then the include the data - almost the entire data appears to be described in the text itself, but lets put the tables as well. Pages and pages and pages of data. The book is 480 pages, but I bet only about 80 contain actual substantive text - probably much less than that. The rest is data, pure data.
And as I said, they are entirely without critique or analytical perspective. For example, they happily describe how the Jakarta region has this unusually high level of education (ch. 3) - for Indonesian standards, that is - without mentioning at all that perhaps educated people are more likely to move to the capital than to stay in the village. Perhaps the reason for the distribution is irrelevant when explaining voting behaviour (although, I doubt it), but if you go through the hassle of explicitly describing every single data point, why not demonstrate that you actually thought about it a bit more than just reading the table itself? Or statements like: “This finding implies that the distribution of per capita income is heavier toward the districts with low per capita income” (p. 219) - surely is it not a finding to discover that income has a skewed distribution? Everybody knows that!
The political analysis is of a similar level. First for two chapters the vote distribution of the various parties is discussed - or rather, presented. There is absolutely no analysis. And then the final chapters contain regression analysis of all these results, explaining the number of votes by the number of Muslims, Javanese, poor, educated, etc. It absolutely ignores the effect of population size - in other words, if there are two districts, each with the same proportion of Muslims and the same proportion of votes for a party, but with different population sizes, their regression picks this up as a clear correlation. Perhaps because all the independent variables have this effect, so the variation in the population size should be captured by the multicollinearity between the variables, this issue is not too serious, but it still seems very odd not to study proportions instead of raw numbers.
When they split their sample to study Java separately from the other regions, they ask why it would be that the effect of the percentage of Javanese or Muslims is so much weaker than in the other regions. But surely, with an area where about 95+% of the population is Muslim, you would not expect much effect of the variation in numbers on the vote? While in the non-Java regions, the variation is much higher, so also more potential for an effect. They also make very easy comparisons of coefficients across models, despite the fact that the population sizes differ, the set of control variables differ (they dropped insignificant variables from the regression - bad habit as such), and the variance in the independent and dependent variables differ. I.e. utterly inappropriate comparisons.
When you write a book using solely aggregate statistics, such as this one, the very first concern would be the problem of ecological fallacy - drawing conclusions about individuals on the basis of aggregate data. In this book they are perfectly happy to claim that Muslims clearly voted this, or that for some party the number of Muslims was very important, but the number of non-Muslims is irrelevant (well, that’s not an example of ecological fallacy, but absolutely no idea what that is based on!), or that the Javanese in the Outer Islands clearly voted for …
On a more positive note, I should state that the data they have is actually quite interesting. And interesting to analyse statistically, as well. Their critique on using a survey of individuals is not reasonable, and such a survey would provide a lot of leverage that this data cannot provide, but the advantage of the aggregate data is that you properly cover the entire country, which with survey analysis is doubtful. But such statistical analysis should be more careful with the conclusions drawn - i.e. avoid the ecological fallacy - and it should also take population size and spatial autocorrelation into account. It would also help if not all independent variables were reduced to dummy variables - why is “ethnicity” only about “Javanese” and “religion” only about “Muslim”?
But I think the worst offense of the book is the title: this is not a statistical analysis of voting behaviour in Indonesia, as it suggests, but rather a data book cataloging a set of variables in Indonesia’s provinces and districts.
December 24th, 2008
A majority of the Amsterdam city council would like to remove the label ‘allochtoon’, which means foreign-born, and replace it with ‘Turkish Amsterdammer’ or ‘Moroccon Amsterdammer’ *). The idea is to get rid of the negative connotation that ‘allochtoon’ now has in Dutch politics and society. But this seems such a dangerous suggestion! ‘Allochtoon’ might have a very specific, negative connotation, and you are not immediately thinking of the American professor who is now living in the Netherlands, but at least it is very straightforward to interpret - simply anyone not born from Dutch citizens (or is it on Dutch soil? 
). By labeling them according to their minority group affiliation, you open up a whole can of worms. What about people with parents from different groups? What about second and third generation? Are we going to keep them under a separate label indefinitely? I always liked the fact that you cannot reasonably call any second or third generation member an ‘allochtoon’.
Further on the motivation, the article states: “The party (PvdA) claims the word (’allochtoon’) to be outdated and argues for a more specific denotation of specific groups of people.” **) Such remarks make me happy I sent in my unsubscription as a member of the PvdA last week. We should not try to get more policies based on specific groups but rather focus on individual rights, room for individual development and enforcement of the law. It is bad enough to be talking about ‘allochtonen’ so much, but at least you can say immigrants do have specific concerns and interests, but lets not divide the entire population in specific subgroups.
*) I know “Amsterdammer” is not really correct English, but I don’t know how else to convey the Dutch similarly spelled word for a resident of Amsterdam.
**) “De partij stelde het woord achterhaald te vinden en pleitte voor een specifiekere aanduiding van bepaalde groepen personen.”
December 8th, 2008
After just recently updating my links page to add links provided by my research design students on how to prepare slides and do presentations, I stumbled on this presentation by Apple’s Steve Jobs on their new line of notebooks. I think this is a very nice example of a good presentation, even if selling a commercial product is not quite the same thing as presenting academic research. The slides are well designed and bare in content; the presentation is clear and to the point; etc. - it all holds as well for academic presentations.
Providing the link is also strong advocacy of Apple’s notebooks, of course, which are indeed great machines, but they’re also totally over-priced. I’m still hooked, but sometimes I wish Linux or FreeBSD would just make a little quicker progress in becoming user-friendly, so that people can buy well-designed (!) PC laptops and install a nice operating system on it. (My reason for liking the Mac so much is: 1) the operating system is based on BSD, so I can use all my Linux tools that I like; 2) it is a zillion times easier to install hardware than on a Linux system, even easier than on a Windows system; 3) the laptops look nice; 4) the laptops have flashy screens, to my knowledge only comparable to the Sony VAIO’s.)
October 16th, 2008
Steve Dekorte writes on his blog: “Gay couples allowed to marry in California. A bigger victory would have been converting all state marriages to private civil contracts and separating the state from marriage entirely, but this is at least a step forward.”
Finally someone who agrees. Why does the state play a role in deciding who should be allowed to share their life with who? Let people make their own private contracts if they wish, and treat them as individuals for the law, and we can stop talking about gay marriages or the marriage being the cornerstone of society, etc.
June 17th, 2008
So in Ireland we are quickly approaching the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. A fierce campaign at least in terms of posters is going on - wherever you look in Dublin, you see posters in favour or against the treaty. Far more NO posters than YES posters, and the NO posters are generally about risks - either realistic or demagogic - of voting in favour of the treaty, while YES posters are usually big pictures of politicians advertising themselves, with in small font in the corner of the poster a sort of “Oh, yes, and also vote YES”. In other words, not half as convincing.
The posters really make me think, actually, and even though I know most of the NO posters are nonsense and based on scaring people for no clear reason, I think think that if I would have to vote right now, I would vote NO. Now, admittedly, I have not actually read the treaty - it’s 272 pages! - and am by no means an expert in the area. Furthermore, I should state quite clearly that I consider myself close to a European federalist - in other words, I’m very much in favour of European integration and want more rather than less of it. So why would I consider voting no?
- Although the treaty definitely makes good progress towards a more democratic Europe - more power to the European Parliament and somewhat more power to national parliaments - it certainly does not go far enough yet. The European Council (the collection of ministerial representatives from each member state) is still very powerful, even though they are only in a very indirect manner responsible to the voter (you do not vote for a member of the Council, but in most countries you vote for a party, which selects leaders, which negotiate on a coalition, which appoints ministers, which then go to the Council). There will be a new President of the Council, which could at least symbolically be a very important role, but he will be elected by the Council itself - no voters need to get involved. So, a step in the right direction, but by far not far enough.
- The implementation of the treaty itself is even more blatantly at odds with everything democratic. So Europe is the place where democracy was born. We’re proud of our democratic credentials and look down on any dictatorial regime. We believe in self-determination of peoples. Yet, when we implement what looks very much like a constitution for Europe, we don’t get any voters involved! We had referendums in the Netherlands and France and they lost - so we just do not ask them again. Only Ireland votes, because by constitutional law they have to vote on every treaty. Hence, because only one small group of European citizens are asked to voice an opinion, and because the reason that others are not asked is because we know they vote no (!), that small group should send a clear signal and vote NO. We need to make a stand and make clear that this is not how you implement major constitutional changes in the EU.
- How can someone be asked to vote on a treaty of 272 pages? Or on something as cryptic as this? And it is not that “vote YES because it’s good for Ireland” is going to be very convincing when nobody understands what they are voting yes for. Of course Ireland has hugely benefitted from European membership in the last decades and it should be grateful and help build a strong Europe. But it should vote NO now and follow the poster that says “we can get a better deal”. The poster refers to Irish self-interests, of course, but even as European citizens as a whole, “we can get a better deal”. When the referendum took place in the Netherlands I was also tempted to vote NO - I must admit I did not vote at all - and exactly for this reason, that one cannot be asked to vote on a text that nobody understands. Why can they not write a proper constitution of only a few pages that is clear and democratic and which will then be voted upon by all citizens of the EU? Is that not how you create a European identity - something they want so badly?
That summarizes my arguments. The core point is that although I’m much for further integration of the EU (and further expansion), more signalling is necessary that when the EU says it wants to generate a “European identity” and says it wants to “fix the democratic gap”, that we should start to take ourselves seriously and do things that are actually democratic. A constitution without vote, a remaining strong role for the Council (perhaps even stronger with the establishment of the Council presidency), and very little relation between Commission appointments and elections are absolutely not signs of democracy.
On a more dreamy level: the Obama - Clinton campaign, which I followed quite closely and with enthousiasm, makes me jealous. Why do we not have a proper president of the EU, elected by popular vote, so that people actually need to campaign my making themselves known? Sell their ideas? Travel around Europe? Gather in town halls and make speeches? No, instead we have a President of the Council, who visits prime ministers in all countries to lobby behind closed doors for an appointment, and in the end it is as much based on which country gets what as it is on political campaigns. Even a Europe that would not integrate any further than the current version - and for the next decade or so this is quite integrated enough already, I’d say - could be run by a much more democratically elected leadership, based on voter opinions and not based on backroom lobbying by government representatives.
June 10th, 2008
Recently, most of the things I read about Russian politics are rather depressing, see, e.g., this recent post. Today I read some more interesting, positive news, though.
Apparently, a leadership contest is on its way within Yabloko (Apple, an acronym of Yavlinsky, Boldyrev, and Lukin, its founders (source)), an opposition party somewhere between liberal and social-democratic. The current leader, Yavlinsky, is a very well-known Russian politician, but appears to be completely sidelined in current developments. Thanks to a revision of the electoral law, including an increase in the threshold, Yabloko has no presence in the current Duma anymore, the parliament. He has also always been blocking moves towards merging with Soyuz Pravikh Sil (Union of Rightist Forces), a more conservative-liberal opposition party. Without joining forces, Russian opposition stands no chance of changing the tide! As Oleg Kozlovsky puts it: “in the conditions of today’s Russia, such alliances are perfectly natural: after all, before you can choose among various doctrines, you first need to win the right to choose in the first place” (Kozlovsky 2007). Now, the leader of the youth movement of Yabloko, Ilya Yashin, tries to unseat Yavlinsky as the party leader.
Since 2005, Yashin has also been a member of the Oborona (Defence) movement (read more here), of which Kozlovsky is also a prominent member. The movement has no centralized leadership, but instead a networked structure (source) - I guess not only Islamist terrorists can organise themselves like this. Much along the lines of the remark by Koslovsky, Yashin wants Yabloko to join forces with the other opposition parties: “People are not able to choose between good democrats and bad democrats, (…) we need to create a democratic party that will act as a magnet for everyone with these general values” (source). The fact that Yabloko and SPS are so antagonistic to each other has always puzzled me - perhaps there is hope. Maybe Yavlinsky is right that Yashin is still too immature and too radical, but I think it’s good that these things still exist in Russia, especially when you see reports about the new youth movement to support Putin, Nashi (which even campaigns for faster production of Putin supporters through procreation!), which strongly resembles Soviet’s Komsomol.
This map reminded me of my MA thesis, in which I studied the political geography of the support for Yabloko and SPS. It definitely encourages me to someday update that research, with more recent Duma elections added, and taking into account the data here.
December 22nd, 2007
I really don’t like it when people argue that Russia is simply not a democratic culture. That Russians are not “ready” for democracy. The argument is paternalistic and seems to assume that Russians are somehow not able to grasp democracy, which is insulting. But sometimes you wonder … What is happening here? An article in the St Petersburg Times, “City Parliament Slammed For Pro-Putin Statement“, discusses how an official statement by the St Petersburg Duma (local parliament) states that regardless of party preference, all Russians should support the “national leader”. Reading about Russian politics is depressing these days.
November 23rd, 2007
Often people want to merge datasets and have names of countries or locations that they want to merge on. These names are often somewhat similar, but not exactly. A function in R that is hugely useful to merge in this case is called agrep. With this function you can do approximate matching of names (or rather, or strings as subset of other strings). To merge properly, though, you do want to avoid matching the same name twice and you want to prioritize exact matches over very fuzzy matches. The idea is not mine, but Eduardo’s. To do so, I wrote a little R function, which is here in beta version:
agrep.wrapper < - function(x, y, names.x = "name", names.y = "name", ids.x = "id", ignore.case=TRUE, max.threshold=1) {
x <- as.data.frame(x, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
y <- as.data.frame(y, stringsAsFactors=FALSE)
unique.x.select <- !duplicated(x[,ids.x])
unique.x.names <- x[,names.x][unique.x.select]
unique.x.ids <- x[,ids.x][unique.x.select]
unique.y.select <- !duplicated(y[,names.y])
unique.y.names <- y[,names.y][unique.y.select]
unique.y.ids <- rep(NA,length(unique.y.names))
matching.x.names <- unique.x.names
matching.x.ids <- unique.x.ids
for (threshold in seq(from=0, to=max.threshold, by=.1)) {
i <- 1
while (i <= length(matching.x.names)) {
select <- (1:length(unique.y.ids) %in% agrep(matching.x.names[i], unique.y.names, ignore.case=ignore.case, max.distance=threshold)) & is.na(unique.y.ids)
if (sum(select) > 0) {
unique.y.ids[select] <- matching.x.ids[i]
matching.x.ids <- matching.x.ids[-i]
matching.x.names <- matching.x.names[-i]
} else
i <- i + 1
}
}
unique.data <- merge(data.frame(unique.x.names, unique.x.ids), data.frame(unique.y.names, unique.y.ids), by.x=”unique.x.ids”, by.y=”unique.y.ids”, all=TRUE)
list(matches = unique.data)
}
March 8th, 2007
I need a post on Bob & Rose. This is a British television series of six episodes, which is basically about a gay man, Bob, and a straight woman, Rose, falling in love, and about their, their friends’ and their families’ reactions. I am simply in love with the series and after watching every episode twice already, I still start laughing when I remember certain episodes. The series is very humorous, brilliantly acted, and very well fleshes out what really matters in life. I can try to give a nice description of the series, but the author, Russell T. Davies (of Queer As Folk fame), does it much better in his own words. And it was a relief to watch a series that is simply positive and where things end up going well. It really makes me happy to watch and the characters are written on purpose in such a way as to be very likable people, I think. So, check it out!
January 24th, 2007
Now that I’m on the subject of movies anyway (I’ve been watching a lot since I have a Netflix subscription), I should also mention the British miniseries I watched last night and this morning. It’s called A Very British Coup and it is a somewhat old series, from 1988, about a socialist leader of the Labour Party who manages to get elected as prime minister. He immediately starts the nuclear disarmament of Britain and demands the removal of U.S. bases from British soil. This of course to the horror of the British military and intelligence establishment who immediately start working on a way to get rid of them. The result is a fairly dark image of the British intelligence community and a very interesting television series. Highly recommended to people who are interested in politics or espionage.
December 23rd, 2006
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