Twitter and Exit Polls in Germany

Believe or not: in Germany, it is illegal to publish results from exit polls before the polling stations close (at 6pm – we’re German) on polling day. Last Sunday, state elections were held in three Länder, and someone leaked alleged results on twitter while the stations were still open. The political class was outraged and…

Weighting Survey Data: Not Necessarily a Brilliant Idea

Should one weight their survey data? Is it worth the effort? The short answer must be ‘maybe’ or ‘it depends’. A slightly longer and much more useful answer was given by Leslie Kish in his enormously helpful paper ‘Weighting: Why, when and how’. Today (well, actually I submitted the final manuscript 2.5 years ago -…

Is salience a cause or a consequence of radical right electoral support?

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:…

ECPR sets up a blog

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?)…

Web-scraping made easy: outwit

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…

Analysis of Voting Figures in the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election

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…