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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Lonna Atkeson, Professor of Political Science and Regents’ Lecturer at the University of New Mexico. We discussed her opinions about improving survey methodology and her thoughts about how surveys are being used to study important applied questions
Empirical work in political science must be based on strong scientifically-accurate measurements. However, the problem of measurement error hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. Recently, Willem Saris and Daniel Oberski’s Survey Quality Prediction software wasdeveloped to better predict reliability and method variance, and is receiving the 2014 Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
In a matter of months, federal elections in the United States will enter full-swing. I recently asked Costas Panagopoulos, a professor at Fordham University and an expert on political campaigns, a few questions about the important elections recently conducted in the United States and what we might learn from those recent campaigns.
Polling data is ubiquitous in today’s world, but it is is often difficult to easily understand the accuracy of polls. In a recent paper published in Political Analysis, Kai Arzheimer and Jocelyn Evans developed a new methodology for assessing the accuracy of polls in multiparty and multi-candidate elections.
Not a day passes when I don’t see something in the news about big data. Sometimes the stories will be about some interesting new big data application. For example I recently read about the WeatherSignal app that is collecting weather data from smartphones. And of course there has been a lot in the news lately about the big data and privacy,
In anticipation of Argentina’s mid-term elections to be held on Sunday, 27 October 2013, Political Analysis co-editor R. Michael Alvarez (Caltech) discussed some of the most important things that we need to know about this contest with Francisco Cantu (University of Houston) and Sebastian Saiegh (UCSD).
Last week, stories emerged about irregularities in elections in Lithuania and Ukraine that took place over the weekend. In the case of Ukraine, ahead of the election Yanukovyc’s government had been blamed of engaging in unfair campaign advertising practices, persecution of opposition leaders, and the fashioning of fake opposition parties; and following the election, international observers from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) noted a series of problems with the conduct the election.
After my co-editor, Jonathan N. Katz, and I took over editorship of Political Analysis in January 2010, one of our primary goals was to extend the readership and intellectual reach of our journal. We wished to grow our readership internationally, and to also deepen our reach outside of political science, into other social sciences.