In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties [caption id="attachment_303" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react"][/caption] makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument:…
Gespräch mit dem Focus: Ungültige Stimmen beeinflussen weder die Zusammensetzung des Parlaments noch die Parteienfinanzierung
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?)…
These days, a bonanza of political information is freely available on the internet. Sometimes this information comes in the guise of excel sheets, comma separated data or other formats which are more or less readily machine readable. But more often than not, information is presented as tables designed to be read by humans. This is…
My ‘Lakatos Reloaded’ rejoinder has just been published by the British Journal of Politics and International Relations (vol. 11 (2009): 526-528. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2009.00372.x).
Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews have published a preliminary analysis of the recent election in Iran. The paper (though it is based on official stats) suggests that the election was indeed rigged to a considerable degree. Here is the complete analysis of the Iranian Presidential Election 2009. p.s. Just…
The publication of thousands of claims by members of parliament that have the most interesting parts are blacked out has triggered a new wave of outrage over members expenses. Now, even the Guardian has to recognise that the Telegraph was instrumental in uncovering the scale of the mess we’re in. And so, in a bid…
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).
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…
I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact…