Here is a simple calculation: A professional shooting would take at least 15 minutes per candidate. The CDU is contesting all seats outside Bavaria. That would be 244/4=61 hours. Even if the Chancellor would endorse only those 65 candidates who are running in non-Bavarian districts not won by the CDU in 2009, this would amount to two normal working days. That seems a bit excessive for a woman who is busy ruling the country.
In 335 hours, the campaign will be history, and it does not look good for the opposition parties. This round includes five new polls. They bring the probability of a third term for Merkel (aka the Merkel-O-Meter) to a new high of 98.4/99.7 per cent. And the Greens are plummeting a bit. Take the figures with loads of salt, but a change in government looks very unlikely.
[caption id="attachment_12671" align="alignleft" width="300"] Studying the Impact of Electoral Systems. Rather Remarkable Psychological and Mechanical Effects[/caption] During a momentary lapse of reason, Liz Carter and I decided to re-run our 2009 section on the New/Radical/Extreme/You Name It/Right. This resulted in two very agreeable days down in Bordeaux, with lots of interesting papers. Compared to the…
The Polls [caption id="attachment_12655" align="alignleft" width="300"] Support for the Major German Parties, Estimates and Predictions (Week 35, 2013)[/caption] Exactly three weeks before the 18th Bundestag election, it’s time for another look at the polls. This weekend brings six new entries: One late result from week 33 that was only published a week ago, three polls…
Last week’s post on Merkel’s very good chances to win a third term created a bit of a stir. This week, I’m back with nine new polls (conducted between August 6 and August 19 by six different companies), which all point into the same direction: The probability of Merkel continuing as chancellor is 98 to 99 per cent.
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…
I’ve just realised that Her Majesty’s government has released the results of the 2011 (!) census at the level of individual output areas. Output areas are small, socially homogeneous cells with an average size of about 300 residents. In other words: The information is incredibly detailed, which is a bit worrying on one level (I…
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.
Here’s a graph that illustrates the decline of turnout in Western Europe over the last three decades. No surprises here, but still just a little bit chilling?
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.