Is here. It’s a Ford-Jennings-Pickup-Wlezien coproduction.
Okay, so uniform national swing doesn’t really work, but just to note that it’s possible to plug in numbers (33:32:26 LD:Con:Lab) from some recent polls, and have Lib Dem > Con > Lab in vote share, but Lab > Con > LibDem in seat share. Messy.
There are a number of things which annoy me about academic publishing.
Matching my output to the requirements of the journal is the worst of them.
I spent a lot of time learning LaTeX in order to make my documents look good.
But now I find that journals require me to make changes to my document which, in [...]
So, it’s election time here in Italy, and as usual, all politicians are concentrating on how to make Italy’s stagnant economy perform better.
Oh, sorry, no, they’re talking about how much time they get on television.
Silvio Berlusconi has now been formally placed under investigation for pressuring officials within Agcom (the sectoral regulator) and Rai. Mauro [...]
Some image-heavy slides from my presentation on the Italian media. Thanks to Jeppe for reminding me.
One of the benefits of having defended my thesis is that I can read some academic articles which are a bit outside my field. Here’s an interesting example from Alex East, entitled, “Testing the de Gaulle hypothesis”.
I’ve written a paper together with Christel Koop on the de facto and de jure independence of regulatory agencies for the 2010 PSA conference, and I’m pleased with it, even if I didn’t get to graph any interaction effects. You can find the paper here.
Some people say magic incantations are bad.
But then, you find a code snippet — sorry, incantation — on Hadley Wickham’s web site, and find out how to plot that interaction effect graph you need.
Isn’t it pretty? The bare bones:
effectdf
Clientelism, like corruption, is a juicy topic; it is made so by the seemingly-inexorable conflict between protestations of public virtue on the one hand and particularistic exchanges on the other. The topic becomes even more interesting when one tries, as Simona Piattoni does in her book Il clientelismo: L’Italia in [...]
This interview with Carlo Taormina is fantastic. Key points (all according to Taormina):
The “processo breve” is a bargaining tool. Offering to remove it from the agenda can be seen as a concession; a concession can win quick approval of a text of “legitimate impediment”.
The bill on “legitimate impediment” (repeated postponement of trial hearings due to [...]