PolBeRG Seminar - A Few Arguments for a Non-Spatial Measure of Party Policy Difference

The first PolBeRG seminar of this year will take place this Friday, September 26, at our usual time and place, 17:30-19:00 in FT 908. We were originally supposed to have a triple presentation (by Levi, Bruno and Fede) on conspiracy theories, but at the last moment this date turned out not to be suitable for all of them. Therefore, we will hear from them during our next meetings.

Thus, for the first seminar this season I (Martin Mölder) will be presenting a paper that I have been working on since spring and which is now basically ready in the form I would want it to be. The topic of the paper concerns issues related to how we should think of and measure the political differences between parties. Although it's focus is on parties, it also constitutes a critique of the spatial metaphor of thinking about political differences (that politics is a space, actors points in that space and the difference between them is the distance between those points) and is thus also applicable to other contexts. I have sent out the paper to the people in our mailing list. If you are not included there, but are interested, please contact me.