Five Links I Liked

Still looking for a Christmas present? Now available in Paperback: Class Politics and the Radical Right – Routledge http://t.co/ilhCXBlczm #InstantClassic Crooked Timber: Fly Air Gini http://t.co/s85aIzxA4u Art Goldhammer on Sarko’s inevitable comeback: He’s baaaaaack! http://t.co/5Q9Eu0Rt5L This has already happened as hinted at here: Trouble in (the Guardian’s) Paradise: anti-immigration party could bring Swedish government down…

The Math of Post-Socialism

Much merriment in the Eastern state of Thuringia: 25 years after the fall of the wall, the Greens and the SPD in the state parliament are poised to form a coalition with the Left (die Linke), which would give the Left its first minister president ever. What’s the Matter with the Left? Predictably, this is…

New Book Project: Handbook of Electoral Behaviour

Very happy: The folks at Sage have kindly signed a contract with Jocelyn Evans, Michael Lewis-Beck, and my own good self to edit a two-volume tome on Electoral Behaviour in their Handbook series. The final product will have some 50 chapters on all aspects of psephology and should come out in 2016. Cat-herding 50+ academics…

One, two, three Excellent Online Surveys

[caption id="attachment_13291" align="alignright" width="225"] An Imperial Duck. Because.[/caption] My wonderful PhD students are running a series of short online surveys, two of them with a slightly unusual and rather intriguing format. If you read German, do them a favour and click on the link. You should be done in 10 minutes or less. And while…

Pretty Perplexing Pirates Posters

The Pirates are running a rather cheap electoral campaign: No faces (models or not) but only drawings in their trademark orange/blue tones. Their stinginess even extends to the meaning of their slogans. I was a bit thrown off by “Borders are so 80”, then discovered the small “er”, so borders are so 1980s, apparently. Well,…

More Silly Election Posters

The local Liberal Democrats never fail to amaze me. Just when I thought it could not get any better, I found another gem for my ever growing collection. [caption id="attachment_13253" align="alignright" width="225"] Local Campaigns: The Hour of Amateurs[/caption] “Höhenflug” is the act of (figuratively) ascending to some higher plane (not an imminent danger here) but…

Analysing Bias in French Pre-Election Surveys with surveybias for Stata (example 1/3)

In a recent publication (Arzheimer & Evans 2014), we propose a new multinomial measure B for bias in opinion surveys. We also supply a suite of ado files for Stata, surveybias, which plugs into Stata’s framework for estimation programs and provides estimates for this and other measures along with their standard errors. This is the first instalment in a mini series of posts that show how our commands can be used with real-world data. Here, we analyse the quality of a single French pre-election poll.