Political interest of citizens usually is depicted as an individual attribute that can be explained by referring to the resources and skills of the people concerned. The analyses presented here are based on a critical assessment of the explanatory power of these approaches in cross-national and...

Quantitative comparative social scientists have long worried about the performance of multilevel models when the number of upper-level units is small. Adding to these concerns, an influential Monte Carlo study by Stegmueller (2013) suggests that standard maximum-likelihood (ML) methods yield...

The Bundestag elections of 2009 meant a crushing defeat for the German social democrats. Never before had a party faced losses at such a high percentage in post-war Germany. The paper argues that these losses were not incurred at the margin but at the core of the social democrats' traditional...

Models of ecological inference (EI) have to rely on crucial assumptions about the individual-level data-generating process, which cannot be tested because of the unavailability of these data. However, these assumptions may be violated by the unknown data and this may lead to serious bias of...