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.

Local Heroes? Der Effekt räumlicher Distanz zwischen Wählern und Kandidaten bei der Unterhauswahl in England 2010″ (Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences)

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Slides (in German) for my recent talk about our geolocation and voting project at the Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences. The presentation is based on [bibtex file=ka.bib key=arzheimer-evans-2012]. The full PDF for the presentation is here.