Kai Arzheimer » EU http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog A political science blog Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:06:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 ECPR sets up a bloghttp://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/ecpr-sets-up-a-blog/ http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/ecpr-sets-up-a-blog/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:09:38 +0000 kai http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/?p=297
300px Santi di Tito Niccolo Machiavelli%27s portrait headcrop ECPR sets up a blog

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The European Consortium for Political Science (ECPR), for all purposes and intents the European Political Science Association, has a tiny problem: at their last meeting, they faced “a shortage of candidates” for the Executive Committee. To their credit, they faced it head on and set up a blog to discuss  “Constitutional and Electoral in (of?) the ECPR”. So far, there is just the inaugural post but I’m sure there is more to come.

ECPR sets up a blog
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]]> http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/ecpr-sets-up-a-blog/feed/ 2 National Content on European Election Postershttp://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/national-content-on-european-election-posters/ http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/national-content-on-european-election-posters/#comments Sun, 31 May 2009 17:00:06 +0000 kai http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/?p=275 Next week, the European Parliament will celebrate its 7th direct election. However, this will be the culmination of 27 national campaigns. Here is a post on the lack of truly European content in the European I wrote for Andrea Römmele’s and Thorsten Faas’ “Wahlen nach Zahlen” blog (in German).

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]]> http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/national-content-on-european-election-posters/feed/ 0 Which party should I vote for in the European Elections?http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/which-party-should-i-vote-for-in-the-european-elections/ http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/which-party-should-i-vote-for-in-the-european-elections/#comments Thu, 28 May 2009 21:48:31 +0000 kai http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/?p=269 With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a big surprise. The Bavarian Christian Democrats and the New Left Party were the biggest distance away from my ideal point, not least because my preferences seem to be more pro-European than these parties.

profiler 1 300x183 Which party should I vote for in the European Elections?

Why I should vote for the LibDems (maybe)

Given that I’m going to vote in the UK, I next tried the EU Profiler, which is an international project that aims at providing the relevant information on party positions for all 27 member states. After evaluating a new set of another 30 items, I was presented with a fancy two-dimensional graph that shows that I should vote for the UK LibDems, although they look more like my least-bad option since the policy space around my ideal point is not exactly crowded. This is because I am luke-warm (but warm) when it comes to European Integration plus a bit of a lefty when it comes to the “socioeconomic” dimension. This dimension, however, looks a bit dodgy, because according to the map, the Tories would be ever so slightly to the left of Labour. Well, maybe they are. At least no one suggest that I should vote UKIP or BNP (who sent me a flyer the other week, suggesting that all those immigrants should leave the UK).

In a bold move I switched from British to German parties and was a little surprised to learn that I should vote New Left, which is reasonably close to my ideal point while the Liberals are rather far away. So it would seem that I suffer from a national-political personality split.

profiler 2 300x182 Which party should I vote for in the European Elections?

Should I vote for the Left party?!?

Still not content with the results, I returned to the wahl-o-mat and discovered that they too have teamed-up with researchers from other countries, meaning that we have apparently two competing pan-European profiler projects. So I answered a final UK-specific questionnaire and was reassured that I should indeed vote for the LibDems, though apparently for different reasons.

While their accuracy of the results might be debatable, these tools provide a lot of information and are great fun.

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