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…
There may be a European election on, but around here, the big one is the local elections. In the plural: On my last count, I will have to vote for town mayor, town council, municipal mayor, municipal council, district council and perhaps even leader of the district council, though I’m not 100 per cent sure…
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.
ZEIT online fill their virtual pages with a piece on the plight of the Austrian Pastafarians, who strive for legal recognition by the state. Apparently the cult of the FSM has risen to such prominence that a ÖVP (Austrian Christian Democrats) politician felt obliged to tweet a picture of their party president shaking hands with…
You could not possibly make this up. Amidst a legal-constitutional battle over the NPD’s survival, the Secretary General (top executive manager) of Germany’s oldest right-wing extremist party NPD resigns over what is by now affectionately known as the Saarbrücken Penis Cake Affair. The story (as ridiculous as it gets) also involves Miss Nationalist Santa, and…
The first round of the French local elections created quite a stir, and the second wasn’t bad for the anoraks either.
[caption id="attachment_13132" align="alignleft" width="408"] Lord Salisbury on the drawbacks of universal suffrage. Cited in David Marquand, Britain since 1918, p. 54[/caption] MP, Peer, Secretary of State for India, Foreign Secretary, Leader of the Opposition, thrice Prime Minister of Britain, architect of the Empire and arch-Conservative. Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury and colloquially known as…
Party system change, illustrated. Germany’s FDP was represented in the federal parliament from 1949 until 2013. During this time, they were part of various government coalitions for more than four decades. In 2009, they managed to attract more than 14 per cent of the vote, their best national result ever. Many voters did not like…
It’s been a boring three months without any offbeat news on the right-wing extremist NPD, but here is hope. The NPD tries to put some distance between themselves and a nationalist porn star.
Yesterday, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled on the constitutionality of Germany’s biggest broadcaster, telling parties to keep away. Plus there is a spoof video in this post.