Article: Policy-driven evidence: Evaluating the UK government’s approach to immigration policy making

 Policy-driven evidence: 
Evaluating the UK government’s approach to immigration policy making

This article critiques a UK government report concerning the impact of non-EU immigration on native employment. This report was a key piece of evidence in the passing of the Immigration Act 2014 and the critique reflects on what problems with the report imply about wider issues in UK government immigration policy-making, particularly in the wake of Breix.

Below is the abstract and a link to the paper online and to download the final version of the paper in PDF format.

The paper was published online by Critical Social Policy in August 2017 and is due to appear in print at a later date (volume/issue numbers will be added then).

Abstract
This critique conducts a technical analysis of a UK Home Office report which was a key justification for passing the Immigration Act 2014. The law seeks to reduce non-EU immigration to the UK. The report is based on a 2012 report by the Migration Advisory Committee which used firmly established methods in the field of immigration studies. Despite this, it is concluded that the Home Office report not only excludes several important aspects of analysis, the entrepreneurialism of migrants and student immigration, but also has severe statistical problems. The report’s choice of operationalisations, lack of information regarding confidence intervals, and lack of sufficient model testing and repetition all combine to make it a weak piece of research and substantially undermine its suitability to inform policy. In the final analysis, this critique posits that the Home Office report reflects the Conservative government’s utilisation of ‘policy driven evidence’.

Key words
Brexit, critique, migration, quantitative, statistics

Link to the article online

Link to download full PDF

Master of Science Dissertation

MSc Dissertation: The Silent Revolution: 

Post Materialist Values and Party Systems in European Democracies

My Masters dissertation concerns the quantitative testing of Ronald Inglehart's 'Silent Revolution'. This comprises a large scale analysis of post materialist values and new parties across Europe. Several large scale data sets are utilised including the BHPS, WVS, EVS and GGSS and the methods are exclusively statistical.

The dissertation revived a first and allowed me to graduate from my Masters with a distinction.

Below is the abstract of the dissertation and a link to download it in full.

Abstract:

This dissertation comprises a longitudinal, cross-national analysis of how changing social values, particularly post materialism, influence political party systems. The hypothesis is that increasingly post materialist values will cause an increase in the prominence of both new left and new right wing parties. The dissertation seeks to test this hypothesis through a multi-stage statistical analysis across several secondary data sets. The first stage is a broad analysis of 8 European nations at the macro-level. This analysis proves largely fruitless. A brief pooled analysis across 101 countries follows the macro-level study and acts as a conduit to the micro-level case studies. The micro UK case analysis then uses BHPS data to perform a full investigation using bivariate, regression and some more niche methods. Methodologically the UK case study is successful but its findings are somewhat more limited, with generally low associations and lack of significance. The final study, the German micro study based on GGSS data, has a different issue. The bivariate associations are impressive with one result showing a very strong association between post materialist values and voting for new parties. However, the German data is not conducive to successful regression analysis as some measures are not recorded consistently across time which makes model building difficult. In conclusion, this dissertation uncovers findings which suggest a link between post materialism and new parties, but not enough evidence is presented to fully conclude on the nature and strength of the relationship.

Link to full document: Tom Wallace MSc Dissertation

Link to do files: MSc Dissertation do files

Magazine Article: Religion and Weddings in Scotland

I wrote this article for the Humanist Society of Scotland's quarterly magazine Humanitie. It was published in the summer 2014 edition.

Abstract:

The role religion plays in modern Scottish society has been in the headlines recently. This article is a brief overview of religious trends and then moves on to discuss the trends in weddings and organisations that conduct them. It concludes that religion is now a minority belief system in Scotland and that the Church of Scotland is becoming an increasingly less important provider of weddings while the Humanist Society is growing.

Link to full article: Religion and Weddings in Scotland PDF

Link to code file for statistics: Do-files

Stata and Benford's Law

I came across this interesting phenomenon called Benford's Law. It states that in a naturally occurring random number sets the probability of 1 being the leading digit of any given number is ~30% and not ~11% as one would expect (the options being 1 through 9). 2 comes up about 18% of the time with decreasing chances all the way through to 9 with ~5%

One thing to note is this dose not happen in limited sets like human hight but does come up everywhere from credit card numbers to the lengths of rivers and this happens irrespective of the units of measurement. Its a difficult phenomenon to understand and involves some mathematics which I don't so if you want to find out more check out the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law

The law can be used to test for fraud because if a set is fabricated by a person or computer it should fail to obey the distribution. I wanted to test this law in Stata and the code below does that - showing an equal distribution and failing the law.

set obs 1000000
gen num = int(1000*uniform())
gen str10 numstring = string(num , "%6.0f")
gen numstring1 = substr(numstring,1,1)
destring numstring1 , generate(num1)

histogram num1 , bcolor(ebblue) lwidth(vthick) 

This happens because Stata and most computer programs cannot generate random numbers; they generate pseudo-random sets.

Master of Arts Dissertation

MA Dissertation: Scottish Electoral Engineering: 

The Introduction of the STV System to the Scottish Parliament

My undergraduate dissertation concerns the impact of introducing the Single Transferable Vote to the Scottish Parliament which currently uses the Additional Member System. It is a technical,semi-statistical, evaluation discussing the possible effects of a change of voting system discussing Electoral Laws, District Magnitude, and Ballot Structure. The use of quantitative methods is not central to the analysis as other work on this blog is.

The dissertation revived  68% (an upper B) and allowed me to graduate with a comfortable 2:1.

Below is the abstract of the dissertation and a link to download it in full.

Abstract:

With the upcoming referendum on Scottish independence, the possibility for electoral reform has become a pertinent issue. This dissertation examines the effects on the party system of introducing the Single Transferable Vote (STV) to the Scottish Parliament replacing the Additional Member system (AMS) system. It does this through a three section approach investigating electoral laws, district magnitudes and ballot structure and using empirical calculations to quantify and support the expected outcomes. After considering all of the outcomes, this dissertation comes to the conclusion that the introduction of STV to the Scottish parliament would increase the proportionality of the party system and increase both the number of parties in the vote and in parliament. This in turn is expected to lead to a fairer party system and increased trust and engagement from the voting public.

Link to full document: Tom Wallace MA Dissertation

Welcome to my blog!

Hello and welcome. I'm Tom and I am currently a Master's student in Applied Social Research at Stirling University. I use quantitative methods and secondary survey data to investigate social and political issues.

My background is in Political studies specifically electoral systems, party systems and political theory. I also do statistical work on a verity of social and economic data sets such as the British Household Panel Survey, the British Social Attitudes Survey, and the World Values Survey.

I am hoping to start a PhD in Politics using qunatatative methods in 2015.

I started this blog to post do-files and information on statistical projects as I complete them which will provide my research with transparency an accessibility. Most of this information would usually be found in an appendix but I am hoping to start attracting contracted quantitative analysis work where a large appendix is less appropriate but access to procedural files is still required ethically.