Nine New Polls Say Merkel Will Still Be Chancellor in October

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Last week’s post on Merkel’s very good chances to win a third term created a bit of a stir. This week, I’m back with nine new polls (conducted between August 6 and August 19 by six different companies), which all point into the same direction: The probability of Merkel continuing as chancellor is 98 to 99 per cent.

A Very Bavarian Campaign Poster

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bavarian-party
2013 campaign poster for the Bavarian (Independence) Party

In my very occasional series on odd campaign posters (are there any others?), here is a particularly fine specimen from Bavaria. The Bayernpartei have their eyes set on (drumroll) Bavarian independence. Their decline began in the 1950s, and they have not been represented in parliament since the 1960s. But that does not distract them from fielding candidates for the upcoming state election, which will be held on September 15, a week before the Bundestag election. They also have wikipedia pages in 18 different languages including Boarisch, the Bavarian dialect. Hey, they even do QR codes.

The ass (sorry) in the left panel is a fairy tale-coded reference to all those German funds going to “Europe”, the slogan in the right panel translates as “Because Bavaria can go it alone”. The Bavarian Lion in the middle is simply your average lion from Bavaria. The party’s projected vote share is about 1 per cent.

Just How Certain is Merkel’s Victory? 96 per cent, give or take

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The Polls Are Noisy Just over five weeks before the Bundestag election, there is much merriment about the current state of play. Support for the Liberals has been consistently below the electoral threshold of  five per cent for months, which implies that Merkel’s coalition would not be able to continue after September. Consequently, everyone is…

Electoral Relay Race: Is Incumbency Advantage Transferable?

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[caption id="attachment_12583" align="alignright" width="225"] Trying to Rub off the Incumbency Advantage from the Old Guy[/caption] The local MP is stepping down after a mere 19 years, and the local mayor wants his job. The outgoing MP won his seat five times in a row on a plurality of the Erststimmen. Structural factors aside, this looks…

Stata Software for Assessing Survey Bias

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BinaryApe / Foter / CC BYIn a recent paper, we derive various multinomial measures of bias in public opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls). Put differently, with our methodology, you may calculate a scalar measure of survey bias in multi-party elections. Thanks to Kit Baum over at Boston College, our Stata add-on surveybias.ado is now available…

A Scalar Measure for Bias in (Multi-Party Pre-Election) Surveys

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All surveys deviate from the true distributions of the variables, but some more so than others. This is particularly relevant in the context of election studies, where the true distribution of the vote is revealed on election night. Jocelyn Evans and I present a method for calculating a scalar measure that neatly summarises such bias for multi-party elections. We also present a Stata module that implements our new method.