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AbstractThe ubiquity of data in the twenty-first century provides unprecedented opportunities for social science research, but it also creates troubling possibilities for privacy violations. The emerging field of statistical disclosure control (SDC) studies how data collectors and analysts can find an optimal solution to balancing privacy protection and data utility. This article introduces SDC to readers in the applied political science research community and outlines its implications for analyzing individual-level data. The vocabulary of SDC is introduced and is followed with a discussion emphasizing just how easy it is to break almost any release of supposedly "anonymized" data. The article then describes how SDC measures almost always destroy the ability of researchers to accurately analyze complex survey data. These results are in conflict with increasing trends toward greater transparency in the social sciences. A discussion of the future of SDC concludes the article.

Left—right is a convenient tool for summarizing the complexities of voter—party linkages in a manner that is comparable across contexts and that avoids the pathologies of preference aggregation in higher dimensions. Yet several reasons exist to believe that left—right is increasingly incapable of summarizing political behavior: the inability of left—right to capture policy concerns beyond economics and religion; the accumulation of new issue concerns over time; pressures for policy convergence stemming from the globalization of the world economy; and the decline of social cleavages that historically structured vote choice. This paper shows that parties are indeed talking about a growing number of issues, they are converging on the left—right scale, and the ideological cues they are sending to voters are growing increasingly ambiguous. Social democratic parties have in particular been affected by these trends.

This article re-examines one of the most prominent theories explaining partisan dealignment in the advanced democracies: cognitive mobilization. Utilizing a diverse collection of cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a variety of countries, it is shown that measures of cognitive skills and access to mass media consistently predict an increase in the probability that a citizen will express an attachment to a party. What is more, this positive relationship is not diminishing over time. The essay concludes with a summary of key questions that remain about the relationship between political knowledge and party identification. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

The study of campaigns has generally focused on a search for effects at the mass level, but little research has explored the behavior of those who actually attempt to influence voters. This essay reports findings from interviews carried out with elites in Spain, an institutionally and culturally diverse country that offers a unique environment for looking at party strategies. Three important findings emerge from the interviews: (1) all campaigns rely on a combination of mobilizing partisans and chasing after non-aligned voters; (2) when appealing to voters, parties prefer to emphasize their advantaged issues; and (3) Spanish elites question the existence of an ideological center. Together these points lend support to issue ownership or saliency theories of campaigns. [Copyright 2008 Elsevier Ltd.]

Expert surveys are frequently used in comparative politics to measure the ideological locations of political parties. However, it is possible that increasing the number of parties to place systematically biases results as experts try to fit more actors onto a common space. We test this possibility with an experiment embedded in an "expert" survey -- with graduate students serving as our pool of experts to ensure an adequate sample size -- by varying the number of parties to be placed in the United Kingdom and Germany. We find some tendency for the variance of Labor and SPD placements to diminish when more parties are present, and for SPD placements to move toward the center given more parties. However, we find no consistent evidence that the number of parties systematically affects mean or median party placements. Our results support the reliability of expert surveys as an indicator of party ideology. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Science functions best within a liberal democracy. Every hypothesis test is an expression of doubt, as it carries with it the implication that a particular presumption may be incorrect (Kruschke 1998), whereas authoritarianism punishes challenges to prescribed beliefs. Consequently, science can lead to true innovation and improvements in knowledge only when laws and social norms permit dissent.