Germany 1990-2011: Some Extra 700 Cases of (Attempted) Right-Wing Murder?

Dec 042013
 

Following the revelations about the forces’ disastrous failure to uncover (let alone catch) the murderous ‘Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund’ terror group, federal investigators have launched a fresh probe into some 3300 unsolved cases of (attempted) murder. According to Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, they have identified 746 crimes that that could have been committed by right-wingers for political reasons. Official records. These cases will be referred back to regional police forces for further investigations. So far, the official number of right-wing murders since 1990 was in the region of some 60 cases. Seriously (though many people doubted this figure).

ross cromarty constabulary Germany 1990 2011: Some Extra 700 Cases of (Attempted) Right Wing Murder?
conner395 / Foter.com / CC BY

Here is the link to the original story (in German).

German Coalition Talks: Crunch Time

Nov 262013
 

Coalition Talks: Not Quite as Speedy as Papal Election (and less fun)

It’s crunch time in Berlin: A mere two months after the election, both the SPD and Merkel’s CDU have announced that they want to resolve all remaining issues during yet another sleepless night of haggling (the Bavarian CSU is more reluctant). Tomorrow, they want to present the ‘coalition treaty’, a 170+ page agenda for the next four years. If the SPD’s restless rank-and-file will approve of this document is (quite literally) a question for another day.

The SPD kicked-off the talks with the announcement that they would no longer unconditionally rule out coalitions with the Left at the federal level (“but hey, no pressure”). It took the CDU some time to respond to this, but they did so with a vengeance: In Hesse, which held a land election on the day of the Federal election, the CDU has now entered coalition talks with the Greens. If these talk succeed, it would be the first CDU/Green coalition in a large non-city state (a coalition in Hamburg broke down relatively quickly, and so did a CDU/FDP/Green coalition in tiny Saarland).

kanzleramt in berlin m German Coalition Talks: Crunch Time
Werner Kunz / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

First and foremost, this is a remarkable development in itself: Hesse has possibly one of the most polarised subnational party systems. Just a few years ago, then CDU leader and long-term minister president Roland Koch quite happily campaigned on the fact that the leaders of the SPD and the Greens had foreign-sounding names. But after the inconclusive election and four full rounds of sounding exercises involving all parties, a CDU/Green coalition is not longer unthinkable.

The Real Result: Less Segmentation?

But the Hessian regrouping also has a long-term, two-level strategic element (although all parties deny it): If the FDP does not rebound, the CDU needs an alternative. And much by the same token, the Greens don’t want to tie themselves too closely to the ailing SPD.

Black-green coalitions have been the stuff of political war games and academic debates for the last two decades. Now, they could become a reality. I’m not sure if the September election and this long, protracted negotiations in Berlin will indeed bring about a viable agreement between Christian Democrats and the SPD. But at any rate, they seem to have quickly reduced segmentation in the German party system.

Surveybias 1.0 on SSC

Nov 252013
 

The new version of our Stata module surveybias has now appeared on SSC. From within Stata, simply run

ssc install surveybias, all

to install it (no surprise here).

For the time being, the article on which the module is based has been ungated. Get it while it is free.

Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Joceyln Evans | OUPblog

Nov 252013
 

The very useful OUP blog has a Q&A session on polling accuracy with Jocelyn Evans and me: Polling accuracy: a Q&A with Kai Arzheimer and Joceyln Evans.

Moreover, Oxford University Press has kindly ungated the Political Analysis paper on our New Multinomial Accuracy Measure (TM), so grab the PDF while it is free.

Just How Biased is Your Survey? Ask our Stata Add-On (Update)

Nov 222013
 

Measuring Survey Bias

In our recent Political Analysis paper (ungated authors’ version), Jocelyn Evans and I show how Martin, Traugott, and Kennedy’s two-party measure of survey accuracy can be extended to the multi-party case (which is slightly more relevant for comparativists and other people interested in the world outside the US). This extension leads to a series of party-specific measures of bias as well as to two scalar measures of overall survey bias.

Moreover, we demonstrate that our new measures are closely linked to the familiar multinomial logit model (just as the MTK measure is linked to the binomial logit). This demonstration is NOT an exercise in Excruciatingly Boring Algebra. Rather, it leads to a straightforward derivation of standard errors and facilitates the implementation of our methodology in standard statistical packages.

voter poll Just How Biased is Your Survey? Ask our Stata Add On (Update)
Those Were the DaysFoter.com / CC BY-SA

An Update to Our Free Software

We have programmed such an implementation in Stata, and it should not be too difficult to implement our methodology in R (any volunteers?). Our Stata code has been on SSC for a couple of months now but has recently been significantly updated. The new version 1.0 includes various bug fixes to the existing commands surveybias.ado and surveybiasi.ado, slightly better documentation, two toy data sets that should help you getting started with the methodology, and a new command surveybiasseries.ado.

surveybiasseries facilitates comparisons across a series of (pre-election) polls. It expects a data set in which each row corresponds to margins (predicted vote shares) from a survey. Such a dataset can quickly be constructed from published sources. Access to the original data is not required. surveybiasseries calculates the accuracy measures for each poll and stores them in a set of new variables, which can then be used as depended variable(s) in a model of poll accuracy.

Getting Started with Estimating Survey Bias

The new version of surveybias for Stata should appear be on SSC over the next couple of weeks or so (double check the version number (was 0.65, should now be 1.0) and the release date), but you can install it right now from this website:

net from http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/stata 
net install surveybias

To see the new command in action, try this

use fivefrenchsurveys, replace

will load information from five pre-election polls taken during the French presidential campaign (2012) into memory. The vote shares refer to eight candidates that competed in the first round.

surveybiasseries in 1/3 , popvaria(*true) samplev(fh-other) nvar(N) gen(frenchsurveys)

will calculate our accuracy measures and their standard errors for the first three surveys over the full set of candidates.

surveybiasseries in 4/5, popvariables(fhtrue-mptrue) samplevariables(fh-mp) nvar(N) gen(threeparty)

will calculate bias with respect to the three-party vote (i.e. Hollande, Sarkozy, Le Pen) for surveys no. 4 and 5 (vote shares a automatically rescaled to unity, no recoding required). The new variable names start with “frenchsurveys” and “threeparty” and should be otherwise self-explanatory (i.e. threepartybw is $B_w$ for the three party case, and threepartysebw the corresponding standard error). Feel free to plot and model to your heart’s content.

Meanwhile, in a Parallel Universe: The Great SPD Party Conference

Nov 182013
 

This weekend, the SPD held their regular (bi-annual) party conference in Leipzig. In some alternate reality, this conference would have approved of the SPD/Green coalition agreement. Short of a resounding victory of the left, however, the leadership took a very interesting gamble when they decided in September that the party base should have a vote on the CDU/SPD agreement when (and if) the current negotiations with the Christian Democrats come to a happy conclusion.

But the event was nonetheless interesting for a number of reasons. First, even before the conference began, the leadership announced that the party would abolish their long-standing policy of non-cooperation with the Left party in the Western states and on the national level (the SPD had no such qualms in the East). This vow of abstinence had proved more and more problematic over the last years, and getting rid of it well ahead of the next election looks like a clever move. But making such a move during the ongoing negotiations was not exactly a subtle hint and also opens up the (very theoretical) possibility of changing sides during this parliament’s lifetime, what ever that may be.

because i love you explore Meanwhile, in a Parallel Universe: The Great SPD Party Conference
kakeyzz—- / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Second, the current leadership was re-elected as planned, but the results were “honest”, which is SPD-speak for lousy. The party’s middle elites happily used the opportunity to vent their anger over the lost election and their frustration with the emerging coalition agreement. Third, the negotiations went on during the conference, but it was leaked that cordial agreement and professional respect had once more turned into shouting matches, and that impasses had been reached after weeks of seemingly smooth progress.

It doesn’t take my inner Machiavelli to smell a ruse within a feint within a plot. After Merkel has basically accepted the introduction of a national minimum wage (she rather disarmingly quoted a survey which showed 78 per cent support for the policy amongst her voters), the SPD more or less openly demand at least two major concessions which are symbolically charged and highly visible while being cheap in economic terms: gay marriage and dual citizenship. Moreover, the leadership hint that the members could still vote against the agreement. This is the classic board strategy (“Personally, I fully agree with you, but the board will never approve the deal if you don’t accept X”). That is one nice stratagem.

But unlike the rank and file members, parts of the SPD middle elites and probably the Christian Democrats, the SPD leadership is afraid of new elections in January. Given the current state of public opinion, the party might lose some more, which would cost them their offices. And Merkel’s CDU has a “board” of their own: their Bavarian sister party, which must also approve of any coalition agreement. German politics will remain interesting (by German standards) for weeks to come.

Replication Data for Political Opportunity Structures and Right-Wing Extremist Party Success

Nov 102013
 

Sometimes, things take a teeny-weeny bit longer. Thanks to a student asking for it, I realised that I had failed to deposit replication data for Liz Carter’s and my 2006 EJPR piece on the POS/Extreme Right nexus. This has been rectified.

Arzheimer, Kai; Carter, Elisabeth, 2013, “Replication data for: Political Opportunity Structures and Right-Wing Extremist Party Success”, doi:10.7910/DVN/23280 UNF:5:zWdBbOEjWqbNoUiRlLTKwg== Harvard Dataverse Network [Distributor] V2

The data, which cover Western Europe during the 1984-2001 period, are now obviously of historical interest in more than one sense. The micro information is drawn from a host of national election studies (this was before the ESS) that were lovingly harmonised under the auspices of EREPS. Clearly, those were the days. But hey, according to Google Scholar, this still attracted 25 citations in 2013 and is my second-most cited piece overall. More importantly, I’m still rather happy with it.

If you are interested and don’t have access to the EJPR, our pre-publication version is here.

November 9: Germany’s Modern History, All in a Day’s Work

Nov 092013
 

If you are a bit like me/bone lazy/easily distracted by lots of other interesting things, you could try to cover four of the five things students will actually remember the essentials of  a one semester German politics class in about three seconds by mumbling “November 9″. If you are slightly more risk adverse, you could rattle off the following list before leaving for the rest of the term:

  1. November 9, 1918: Following what passes for a revolution, a communist (Karl Liebknecht) and social democrat (Philip Scheidemann) independently proclaim the republic (in two different places), bringing an end to feudalism and leaving just about everyone unhappy and resentful for the next 15 years. [Service announcement for the Brits: If two German lefties could do this almost a century ago, you could at least reconsider your options, yes?]
  2. November 9, 1923: One Adolf Hitler leads an uprising of his Nazi party, other right-wing groups and parts of the army against the republic. The coup fails abysmally. While some of the rebels are shot, Hitler survives unscathed, receives a a very lenient prison sentence and goes on to reinvent his party and himsesf.
  3. November 9, 1938: In the November pogrom, more than a thousand synagogues and countless schools, shops, hospitals and private houses are destroyed. Tens of thousands of Jews are wounded, killed, or deported to concentration camps, giving the world a taste of what was to come.
  4. November 9, 1989: Günter Schabowski’s cock up brings down the Berlin wall and the GDR.

See? You too can cram 70+ eventful years of German history into your students’ 90 second attention span.

Bonustrack: Since this is the age of rich media and poor teaching quality, I even found some video clips of Scheidemann’s declaration and Schabowski’s equally momentous press conference.

 

 

Gibt es eine europäische Wertegemeinschaft? Die Wertpräferenzen der Europäer, 2002-2010

Nov 082013
 

Slides (in German) for a talk I gave at the University of Zurich on the idea of a European set of value priorities. While preferences are very similar across Europe, with universalism and benevolence coming out top and self-enhancement ranking low, security is crucial for the post-communist societies in Central & Eastern Europe. I further claim that this finding is not driven by economic disparities. This is an update to and extension of my chapter on the notion of a European community of shared values. Somewhat ironically, the preliminary results from the 2012 wave of the ESS were published on the day I gave that talk, so I should go back to the drawing board soon.

What Happens If No One Wants to Govern with Merkel? Are We All Belgians Now?

Sep 252013
 

What’s the Matter with Germany?

At least in Germany, people begin to realise that Merkel may have painted herself into a corner by winning so gloriously (told you so first thing on Monday). While her Christian Democrats are by far the largest party group in the new Bundestag, she needs a coalition partner, but nobody wants to play.

kanzleramt in berlin What Happens If No One Wants to Govern with Merkel? Are We All Belgians Now?
Werner Kunz / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

The Social Democrats are not exactly keen to form a coalition with Merkel. They came out of the last Grand Coalition (2005-2009) very badly damaged and have hardly recovered from that electoral blow. And a new CDU/SPD coalition would be not so ‘grand’ any more. In 2005, the SPD and the Christian Democrats were not so far apart in terms of votes won. This time, there is a 16 point gap between the two.

The important NRW state party, which represents roughly a quarter of the party’s total membership,  is positioning itself against a Not-So-Grand Coalition. The party’s left-wing opposes on principal grounds, and because they feel that this would further strengthen the Left party. The party leadership is officially stalling just a bit, saying the situation is open. Talks will be ‘ergebnisoffen’ – non-directive. And they are seriously telling the Greens that it’s a dirty job, so perhaps they should do it.

A CDU/Green coalition on the other hand, while not impossible, is unlikely. The idea was all the rage a couple of years ago, but it did not work well in the Länder. Moreover, the party has moved to the left during the campaign (something they are regretting now) and returned to a more polarised view of the political world. The party leadership has resigned over the slightly disappointing result. Some of them will return, but it is not yet clear what the balance of power within the party will look like, and any new leadership will find it extremely difficult to sell a coalition with Merkel to the rank-and-file, who have a de facto veto.

This may very well be a thinly disguised attempt to drive the price of a black-red (or black-green) coalition upwards. In 1998 and 2002, it took roughly a month to form a government. In 2005, SPD and CDU needed 55 days. In 2009, the FDP/CDU/CSU government was sworn in about 40 days after the election. But what will happen if both the Greens and the SPD refuse to play (it is still silly season, but nobody’s talking CDU/Left. Yet)?

Is a Minority Government Possible? Will There Be New Elections?

In Germany, there is always a procedure, and in this case, it is spelled out in the constitution, whose framers were obsessed with stability (for very good reasons). The new parliament will be convened on October 22, 30 days after the election. That is the constitutional maximum. With this first plenary meeting (parliamentary parties haven been holding business meetings since Monday), Merkel’s second term as Chancellor will end, and so will the tenure of her ministers. The Federal President will however ask her ‘to continue to manage Germany’s affairs’ until a successor is appointed, and she is obliged to heed that request. So are the ministers. There is no ‘gap’: We’ll always have someone who tells us what to do.

The president will then go to parliament and propose a successor. But ‘then’ is relative. Interestingly, the constitution which is usually very precise, does not stipulate a time-frame. Leading commentators say the time-frame must be ‘appropriate’. Four weeks are ok. Six weeks would be ok, too, I think. But how much longer?

In theory, the president could come up with any proposal, but in practice, his suggestion has always been based on a viable coalition agreement between the parties, since his proposal must be confirmed by more than one half of its members (as opposed to more than half the members happening to be in the chamber at that point). The constitution is extremely wary of unstable majorities, let alone minority government.

Should the president’s candidate not be elected (this has never happened in the past), parliament has 14 days to make up their minds. During this period, they can elect anyone who manages to get the votes of more than half of the members without the president having any say.

Failing this, parliament will have one last vote on the Chancellor. Under this rule, the person receiving the most votes wins. If, by some happy coincidence, the number of these votes exceeds the number of half the members of parliament, the new Chancellor is sworn in and appointed. If it is less, the president has a choice: Within seven days, he can either appoint the Chancellor to lead a minority government or trigger new elections. Again, the choice is his in theory, but in practice, he would consult with the parties.

So where does that leave us?

Should both the Greens and the SPD refuse to join a Merkel government, they could still form a coalition with the Left or negotiate a toleration arrangement. But that seems unlikely, since the political costs would be very high, and it is not clear that all leftist MPs would vote for him. A small group of SPD and/or Green MPs could vote for Merkel to get on with it, without the parties entering a formal coalition, or one of the two parties could officially decide to tolerate her. As long as that would give her a majority in the inaugural vote, the president would have to appoint her. Or the parties could agree on having another election, with unknown consequences (AfD and/or FDP entering parliament, losses for all but the Left?).

Given these prospects, a CDU/SPD coalition will probably look like the lesser evil once everybody has calmed down a bit. But that might take some time.