You reached the website of Martin Elff, a political scientist with research
interests in political behaviour, comparative politics, political
sociology, and political methodology. In addition I am also interested in
programming in R and other languages, including implementing statistical
method in software. I currently work as a professor of political
sociology at Zeppelin University. In my free time
I also practice Aikido, yet not as often as I want and should to.
Below you find a collection of blog posts I wrote over the years. They are
mostly announcements of research presentations, publications, working papers,
and software package updates. In the future I might also post some thoughts
that I would like to discuss, but that not might get into academic journals or
working papers. Most of the dates of the posts are the dates when they were
published. Some of the dates are ficticious however, in so far as they do not
indicate the date when I put them on my website but rather the date when the
relevant presentation was made or the paper was published.
25 November 2020
My new book “Data Management in R: A Guide for Social Scientists” is now in
print and is announced by SAGE to appear
on 26 December 2020, right on time for Boxing Day!
Supporting material can be found on the page “Data Management with R: A Guide for Social Scientists”.
Read more ...
10 August 2020
I am currently working on a book chapter about “Sozialstruktur und Wahlverhalten
in Ost- und Westdeutschland – Konvergenz, Divergenz oder Persistenz?” (Social
Structure and Voting Behaviour in East and West Germany – Convergence,
Divergence, or Persistence?). In this context I found the remarkable result
shown in the following figure.
Read more ...
13 May 2020
Our paper on “Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters: Improving Likelihood-based
Methods” is now published as an open access article by the British Journal of Political Science
(Elff, Heisig, Schaeffer, and Shikano 2020), along with a comment by Daniel
Stegmueller (Stegmueller 2020) and a response by us (Elff, Heisig, Schaeffer, and Shikano 2020).
Read more ...
22 November 2019
Release 0.99.20.1. has been published on CRAN. It improves the way the
package interoperates with RStudio and “tidyverse”. In particular:
A function view() provides a generic interface to the GUI function
View() in base R and RStudio. It makes it possible to extend it to
data objects of the classes “data.set”,
“codeplan”,
“descriptions”, and “importer”.
A method for “data.set” objects allows to transfer these
objects more easiliy into the “tidyverse”, i.e. facilitates the use of
functions from these package ecosystem on data sets imported or created with
memisc. An as_haven() function translates “data.set” objects into
“tibbles” with that extra information that the “haven” package adds to
“tibbles” imported with the help of that package. This should allow to view
and post-process data imported with memisc more or less the same way as if
the data were imported with “haven”.
Read more ...
23 March 2019
A new release 0.99.17.1 of my package memisc has been published on CRAN.
The new release has the following improvements:
mtable() results now include a legend for significance symbols.
A codeplan() function creates a data frame that describes the
structure of an "importer" or "data.set" object. Such
“codeplans” can be used to copy the “item structure” or code plan from
one object to another.
Read more ...
30 March 2018
An article entitled “Method Factors in Democracy Indicators” just has
appeared in Politics and Governance. It analyses the degree to
which democracy indicators are influenced by the orginisation that created
them. It shows that the origin of indicators in particular affects the
detection of change in regimes.
Read more ...
