Author Archive

  • May
    16
    2011

    The Coalition at One

    Is the title of this excellent looking conference at which I’ll be presenting.

  • May
    16
    2011

    Upgrading to Natty Narwhal

    This upgrade was much smoother than my upgrade to Maverick. Only problem concerned the notification for the dropbox daemon, but following the tips in the comment page here sorted that out.
    Not sure what I think about Unity, and I haven’t worked out where the setting for the number of workspaces is (it’s not in [...]

  • May
    09
    2011

    Female DG for Rai

    I haven’t been blogging much about public broadcasting recently. I’ll be blogging more as and when my book comes out. But here’s a tit-bit from Italy: Lorenza Lei has been appointed as first female director-general of Rai. Reasons to be cheerful:

    Lei replaces Mauro Masi, who had an unhappy and brief (two-year) tenure.
    Lei was appointed by [...]

  • May
    04
    2011

    Why I’ll be voting Yes to AV

    In this Thursday’s referendum on voting reform, I’ll be voting Yes to a change in the UK’s electoral system.
    I’ll probably be in a minority. Polls show consistent double digit or greater leads for the No campaign. But I thought it might be useful to say why I’m voting Yes to the Alternative Vote.

  • May
    02
    2011

    Italy today review

    My contribution to the Mammone/Veltri edited collection, “Italy Today”, is referenced obliquely in Tim Parks’ write-up at the New Yorker:

    Many of the essays in “Italy Today” describe situations that tend to support Graziano’s gloomier analysis. One focusses on an aging political élite that “is indecisive and creates obstacles,” and “hides itself cynically in nepotistic protection.” [...]

  • May
    01
    2011

    AV event in Norwich

    I’ll be acting as an ‘expert witness’ in an AV debate on Tuesday 3rd May, 6pm, at the Curve Auditorium in the Forum, Norwich. Here’s the event flyer

  • Apr
    26
    2011

    MPs’ Twitter activity reveals their ideology

    A couple of weeks ago I posted about an analysis of Senatorial candidates’ ideology using their Twitter accounts. The analysis was done by Aaron King, Frank Orlando, and David Sparks. There’s a write-up here.
    I thought the paper was so cool that I replicated the analysis for the UK context. The note is available here, and [...]

  • Apr
    20
    2011

    New paper, “Is Ed Red? Candidates and Electors in Labour’s 2010 Leadership Elections”

    I’ve missed out on this year’s PSA, but in my defence I’ve been hard at work.
    I’ve just finished a very preliminary draft of a paper on the Labour leadership elections. It draws on the same data I noted earlier.
    The abstract is as follows:
    I analyse the preference data of Labour MPs and MEPs in [...]

  • Apr
    10
    2011

    New paper, “On the specificity on constitutions”

    I’m presenting a paper at the SLSA this week. It’s about the specificity of constitutions. The question is this: how can you measure how specific a constitution is — apart from using some proxy like length in words?
    The answer given by Elkins and Ginsburg is this: enumerate some canonical list of constitutional provisions, and count [...]

  • Apr
    06
    2011

    Estimating ideology through twitter networks

    This MPSA paper is cool. H/t the Monkey Cage.

 
Powered by Wordpress and MySQL. Theme by openark.org