Fringe Parties

There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “fringe party”. “Fringe party” is mostly used by journalists, politicians and political scientists as a pejorative term to demarcate the boundary between “reasonable politics” and the “lunatic fringe”, a label famously applied by Theodore Roosevelt in his Autobiography to describe “the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a [reform] movement and always discrediting it” (Roosevelt 1922, 206). Consequently, some political scientists have argued that the term should best be replaced by more neutral expressions, such as “marginal parties”, “non-established parties” or “non-mainstream parties”.

Stichwort: Politikverdrossenheit

Politikverdrossenheit, ein Gefühl der Unzufriedenheit mit verschiedensten polit. Objekten: Politikern, →Parteien, Politikinhalten, Entscheidungs- und sonstigen Strukturen. Der Begriff hat seit den 1990er Jahren verwandte, aber spezifischere Begriffe wie Staats-, Demokratie-, Politiker- und Parteienverdrossenheit faktisch abgelöst. Der damit verbundene Mangel an Präzision wird in der Literatur häufig kritisiert. (1) P. wird auf eine Vielzahl von disparaten…

Bread and butter à la française: forecasts of the French legislative vote from regional economic conditions

It is well known that citizens tend to blame the government for economic hardship, and that they see legislative elections as
an opportunity to “throw the rascals out”. However, while this mechanism has been thoroughly explored as a basis for election
forecasting in the US and many Western European countries, research carried out on the semi-presidential case of France has
only developed more recently. We employ a constrained model predicting votes for principal party groupings, rather than relying
upon simple incumbent/opposition vote prediction. Building upon work by Auberger and Jerome and Jerome-Speziari, we adopt
a time-series approach, using data from 1981 forwards to look for evidence of variation at the departmental level in support
for party groups and economic indicators such as unemployment and GDP. We then assess the model’s efficacy in retrodicting first-round legislative election results in France.