1 Introduction [caption id="attachment_22876" align="alignright" width="212"] Download this text as PDF[/caption] From its very beginnings, psephology has been at the forefront of methodology and has sometimes pushed its boundaries (see e.g. King, 1997 on ecological regression). Methods such as factor analysis or logistic regression, that were considered advanced in the 1990s, are now part of…
1. Introduction In the field of public opinion and voting behaviour, few concepts have stimulated as many analyses and have aroused as much debate as that of party identification. The idea of a durable “identification” with a political party has been a staple in American electoral studies since the 1940s and is at the core…
1 Introduction For the last twenty-five years or so, party identification has been said to be in decline in Germany. And yet, those two parties which are most closely associated with traditional concepts of partisanship, i.e. the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) on the right and the Social Democrats (SPD) on the left – are once more…
Within less than two years of being founded by disgruntled members of the governing CDU, the newly-formed Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has already performed extraordinary well in the 2013 General election, the 2014 EP election, and a string of state elections. Highly unusually by German standards, it campaigned for an end to all efforts to save the Euro and argued for a re-configuration of Germany’s foreign policy. This seems to chime with the recent surge in far right voting in Western Europe, and the AfD was subsequently described as right-wing populist and europhobe.
On the basis of the party’s manifesto and of hundreds of statements the party has posted on the internet, this article demonstrates that the AfD does indeed occupy a position at the far-right of the German party system, but it is currently neither populist nor does it belong to the family of Radical Right parties. Moreover, its stance on European Integration is more nuanced than expected and should best be classified as soft eurosceptic.
In this paper, we propose a polling accuracy measure for multi-party elections based on a generalisation of Martin, Traugott and Kennedy’s two-party predictive accuracy index. Treating polls as random samples of a voting population, we first estimate an intercept only multinomial logit model to provide proportionate odds measures of each party’s share of the vote, and thereby both unweighted and weighted averages of these values as a summary index for poll accuracy. We then propose measures for significance testing, and run a series of simulations to assess possible bias from the resulting folded normal distribution across different sample sizes, finding that bias is small even for polls with small samples. We apply our measure to the 2012 French presidential election polls to demonstrate its applicability in tracking overall polling performance across time and polling organisations. Finally we demonstrate the practical value of our measure by using it as a dependent variable in an explanatory model of polling accuracy, testing the different possible sources of bias in the French data.
Steinbrink et al.’s analysis of various knowledge networks in German Human geography offers fascinating glimpses into the structure of the subfield. We identify two potential problems, and one point of departure for further research. First, Steinbrink et al. limit their analysis to tenured professors, who are not necessarily representative for the the discipline as a whole. Therefore, their results may be biased. Second, they focus on publications in German journals. Without further information, we cannot know whether people who appear to be outsiders within this subnetwork are in fact well integrated once the global network of international journals in considered. Third, the charms of Social Network Analysis are sometimes too seducive. While snapshot studies such as the one by Steinbrink et al. provide intriguing insights, future work should be complemented by explicitly comparative perspectives and a first principles approach to „optimal“ structures for knowledge networks.
West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention over the past two decades due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe during this period. This article puts forward an explanation of the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been considered previously. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote. Then, it turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote, including institutional, party-system and conjunctural variables. The article concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe. The findings go some way towards challenging the conventional wisdom as to how the advance of the parties of the extreme right may be halted.
A short reply to Lister’s rejoinder to my comment on his paper on institutions and turnout.
The state election of 2006 in Rheinland-Pfalz resulted in a (bare) majority of the seats for the SPD, which allows the party to govern alone for the first time in the history of the state. The CDU, on the other hand, received slightly less than one third of the vote, an all-time low in its former stronghold. This result was by and large determined by factors at the state level. Yet, it had a considerable impact on the federal level: It signalled the end of a string of devastating losses for the SPD, enhanced the standing of minister president Kurt Beck (now the SPD’s chairman), and brought an end to the last coalition between the SPD and the FDP. This repercussions notwithstanding, there is there is no evidence of a durable voter realignment benefiting the SPD, since the party’s victory was apparently due to short- and mid-term factors. Therefore, the outcome of the next election (scheduled for 2011) is by no means a foregone conclusion.
1. Introduction Since 1949, German political parties have apparently operated under very favorable conditions. One of the foremost articles of the Federal Constitution (which was framed almost exclusively by former party politicians who survived the terror of the Nazis) secures them a guaranteed role in the political process and grants them special privileges.1 More important…