Welcome to Martin Elff’s website!¶

About Me

My name is Martin Elff, I am a political scientist with research interests in political behaviour, political sociology, comparative politics, and the methodology of political and social sciences. Besides teaching, research, academic governance, I also wrote some software, mostly in R.

Since 2015 I am a professor of political sociology at Zeppelin University (Friedrichshafen, Germany).

You can also find me on

What you will find here

Information about

my publications (including links to replication material, where available)
scientific data that I contributed
software packages I created
subjects I have been teaching
news about publications and software
contact information
my vita

Below you find a quick overview of these topics.

Selected publications

Elff, Martin, Jan Paul Heisig, Merlin Schaeffer, and Susumu Shikano. 2021. “Multilevel Analysis with Few Clusters: Improving Likelihood-based Methods to Provide Unbiased Estimates and Accurate Inference”. British Journal of Political Science 51(1): 412-426.

Elff, Martin. 2020. Data Management with R: A Guide for Social Scientists. London: SAGE Publications.

Elff, Martin and Sebstian Ziaja. 2018. “Method Factors in Democracy Indicators”. Politics and Governance 6(1): 92-104.

Elff, Martin. 2013. “A Dynamic State-Space Model of Coded Political Texts”. Political Analysis 21(2): 217-232.

Elff, Martin. 2009. “Social Divisions, Party Positions, and Electoral Behaviour”. Electoral Studies 28(2): 297-308.

Software packages

There are a few software packages I wrote for helping me in my research, creating this website, or which I just wrote for fun and out of curiosity (however I have only little time for this).

On this website you find information about the following R packages in particular:

Research interests

My are research interests in the following areas:

Political behaviour, in particular electoral behaviour and its relation with social structure. More specifically:
- class voting
- religious voting
- long term change
- the influence of parties’ (changing) positions
- with a focus on Germany
- with a focus on (Western) Europe
Reconstructing the political positions of parties
Quantitative methods of the social sciences
- Multilevel modelling
- Modelling of qualitative/categorical dependent variables
- Cross-level inference

Teaching subjects

Throughout my career I taught a couple of subjects, including

Political sociology and political behaviour
- Introduction to political sociology
- Attitude formation and public opinion
- Electoral behaviour
Comparative politics
- German politics
- West European politics
- Parties and party systems
Socials science research methods
- Research design and methods (at various levels)
- Data analysis (at various levels)
- Data analysis and graphics with R
- Mathematical tools for social scientists