Xavier Fernández-i-Marín

I am research fellow at ESADEgeo (Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics) working on the determinants of the cooperation amongst countries and Global Governance. I am also member of the GlobalReg Project on the diffusion of regulatory institutions.

My main research interests include the study of global governance, the diffusion of policies and institutions and the processes of development of regulatory agencies. I work also on Internet and e-Government diffusion and other related aspects of the public management of the Information Society.

I have been "Juan de la Cierva" post-doc research fellow at IBEI (Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals) from 2009 until 2011.

I presented my PhD on Technology and Public Policy: An Evaluation of Internet and e-Government policies in Spain in 2008 at the Political and Social Science Department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

I maintain a blog aimed at Bridging science, social science, research tools and methods to learn about the governance of the world.

Contact Details

Xavier Fernández i Marín
PhD in Political and Social Sciences (UPF)
Postgraduate in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection (University of Essex)

e-mail:
Phone: +34 93 495 38 49 or ESADE: +34 93 280 61 62 #2533
Av. Pedralbes 60-62
08034 Barcelona

Research Publications and Papers

List of publications in peer-reviewed journals and some research papers presented in Conferences, sorted by date of publication.

• The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies: Channels of Transfer and Stages of Diffusion, with Jacint Jordana and David Levi-Faur. Published at Comparative Political Studies (2011), 44(10) 1343-1369. doi:10.1177/0010414011407466. (local copy in pdf). Get the reference.
• The Impact of e-Government Promotion in Europe: Internet Dependence and Critical Mass, Policy & Internet: Vol. 3: Iss. 4, Article 2. doi:10.2202/1944-2866.1093 (local copy in pdf).
• "Electronic Publishing, Knowledge Sharing and Open Access: A New Environment for Political Science", with Mauro Calise and Rosanna de Rosa. Published at European Political Science (2010) 9, S50-S60. doi:10.1057/eps.2010.35. (pdf version).
• Application of a Bayesian state-space model for "polling the polls" described in Jackman 2005 to a multiparty system. Example and forecast of catalan elections in 2010 and Spanish elections in 2011 (in catalan).
• "Marco Cultural de Referencia y Participación electoral en Cataluña", in Revista Española de Ciencia Política, 2010. With Jaume López (in spanish). Application of Item-Response models to the estimation of an individual cultural frame, and its application to explain electoral participation in Catalonia.
• "Regionalization and Globalization in Regulatory Capitalism: the Regional Dimension in the Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies". 2010. With Jacint Jordana and David Levi-Faur. Biennial Conference of the ECPR standing group on Regulatory Governance. Application of a Bayesian time series cross section analysis with spatial effects.
• "The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Agencies. Channels of Transfer and Stages of Diffusion". With Jacint Jordana and David Levi--Faur. IBEI Working Papers 2009/28. ISSN: 1886--2802. SSRN
• Impacte del Programari Lliure (GNU/Linux) a Catalunya: quants fan què?. Jornades de Programari Lliure, 2009 (in catalan).
• "Modelos de Administración Pública. Sirven los Servicios Públicos Electrónicos a la Administración o a los ciudadanos?", Administración & Cidadanía, vol 2, number 3, 2007 (in spanish)
• "Which Internet Policy? Assessing Regional Initiatives in Spain". The Information Society. Volume 21, number 5, november-december 2005. With Jacint Jordana, David Sancho and Yanina Welp.
• "Planificant la Societat de la Informació. Una anàlisi de les iniciatives impulsades per les Administracions Públiques a Espanya" (catalan), (Planning the Information Society. An analysis of the initiatives driven by the public administrations in Spain). 2003. Generalitat de Catalunya. With Jacint Jordana, David Sancho, Yanina Welp and Imma Puig. (local copy in pdf).
• "España y la sociedad de la información ¿Planes o políticas?" ("Spain and the Information Society, ¿Plans or Policies?"), Gestión y Análisis de Políticas Públicas, 26/27 (January - August 2003), with Yanina Welp

Current Teaching

• Statistical Analysis at the Master on International Relations at IBEI.
• Comparative Politics and Democratizations at the Master on International Relations at IBEI.

Statistics and Software

If you are in doubt between using SPSS or STATA for statistical analysis in social sciences, forget it. Try R. R is a fully programming language and offers great graphical facilities.

I maintain a webpage with resources to help to introduce R into the social sciences, that include some example scripits and how to start with the program.

I have contributed to other programs of interest for statistical analysis:

• JAGS ebuild (Gentoo package)

Introductory documents and scripts to help with some techniques:

• Notes on logistic regression with stata
• R Program to calculate matrices of geographical distances and contiguity for data from gadm.org and other spatial polygons

process_nici.py (and description) is a python script that reads GS-EC-NICI files and organizes samples, compounds and concentrations in a way that is easy to process later by statistical software.

Webpages

List of webpages that I administer currently:

• ECPR Standing Group on Regulatory governance webpage
• Research Group on Government, Management and Public Policy webpage

Links and Data Sources

• UNdata: access to data from the United Nations
• Penn World Table: International Comparisons
• World Bank: includes World Development Indicators, worldwide Governance Indicators
• IMF: Statistics from the IMF
• OECD statistics portal
• Correlates of War: Includes trade, territorial changes and spatial matrices, system membership, alliance
• Polcon: Political Constraint index, veto players
• Polity IV: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions
• Regional Authority Index: authority of regional governments
• Eurostat: Information Society Indicators
• GADM: Global Administrative areas. Spatial files for subnational administrative regions
• Infochimps: search engine for data sets
• Data Market: search engine for data sets
• Factual: search engine for data sets
• International Studies Compendium Project list of datasets regarding International topics