Counting the number of mainstream candidates living in a constituency is a point-in-polygon problem: each candidate is a co-ordinate enclosed by a constituency boundary. R function overlay from package sp carries out the relevant operation. Counting candidates and mapping their number is easy if you remember one thing: VECTORISATION
The European Social Survey will drop 30 items from its core questionnaire in round 6 including information on party membership and media use
It’s that time of the year again: I’ve updated my very eclectic and sometimes frankly erratic bibliography on the Extreme Right in Western Europe (aka the (or Radical/Populist/New/Far/Anti-Immigrant Right). Rejoice, PhD students, and leave your dungeons for what remains of spring break!
The effect of geographical distance between candidate and voter on vote likelihood in the UK is essentially untested. In systems where constituency representatives vie for local inhabitants’ support in elections, candidates living closer to a voter would be expected to have a greater probability of receiving that individual’s support, other things being equal. In this paper, we present a first test of this concept using constituency data (specifically, notice of poll address data) from the British General Election of 2010 and the British Election Survey, together with geographical data from Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, to test the hypothesis that candidate distance matters in voters’ choice of candidate. Using a conditional logit model, we find that the distance between voter and candidates from the three main parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) matters in English constituencies, even when controlling for strong predictors of vote-choice, such as party feeling and incumbency advantage.
Confused by Civic Platform’s current calamities? Let down by Law and Justice? Perturbed by perm-prone Palikot’s movement (ok, enough of that!)? Ben Stanley, my man in Warsaw, has the answers on his new Polish Party Politics blog. For starters, he brings us lots of beautiful maps like this, which shows the gap between pro-enlightenment forces…
Colleagues/friends Matt Goodwin and Jocelyn Evans have created quite a stir with their report on the attitudes of BNP and UKIP supporters/voters. Obviously, UKIP is not happy at all about being lumped together with what remains of Nick Griffin’s party. Being introduced as a ‘polite alternative’ to the BNP (albeit with a rhetorical question mark)…
Just under one year after the fact, here is my analysis of the latest election in Rhineland-Palatinate.
The 2011 election in Rhineland-Palatinate was a political earthquake: Following a string of political scandals, the SPD lost almost ten percentage points of their support, while the CDU could hardly improve on their disastrous 2006 result. The FDP is no longer represented in the state parliament. The Greens more than tripled their last result, allowing them to enter a coalition with the SPD for the first time.
Analyses at the municipal level show that the party improved most in their urban strongholds while still showing a (relatively) weak performance in rural areas. This will make it difficult to sustain the momentum of their victory. Moreover, the SPD is battered and bruised and needs to select a new leader, but veteran minister president Kurt Beck shows no inclination to step down. This does not bode well for a coalition that needs to organise the state’s fiscal consolidation and structural transformation.
runmlwin is an ado that claims to make the functionality of MLwiN available as a Stata command, postestimation analysis and all. Too good to be true?
My long-overdue review of David Art’s latest book (Inside the Radical Right) for West European Politics.
I’m currently working on an analysis of the latest state election in Rhineland-Palatinate using aggregate data alone, i.e. electoral returns and structural information, which is available at the level of the state’s roughly 2300 municipalities. The state’s Green party (historically very weak) has roughly tripled their share of the vote since the last election in…