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…
The publication of thousands of claims by members of parliament that have the most interesting parts are blacked out has triggered a new wave of outrage over members expenses. Now, even the Guardian has to recognise that the Telegraph was instrumental in uncovering the scale of the mess we’re in. And so, in a bid…
Next week, the European Parliament will celebrate its 7th direct election. However, this will be the culmination of 27 national campaigns. Here is a post on the lack of truly European content in the European I wrote for Andrea Römmele’s and Thorsten Faas’ “Wahlen nach Zahlen” blog (in German).
With the upcoming EP elections, I felt obliged to check out the profiler sites my colleagues have put on the internet. I started with Germany’s wahl-o-mat that has been around for a number of years. After evaluating 30 statements, the program decided that I should vote for the German Liberals, which was not such a…
I kid you not: yesterday the Daily Mail, not normally a promoter of civic education, published a Venn diagram outlining the overlap between the three main parties’ proposals for dealing with the parliamentary expenses mess. As diagrams go, this was not exactly brilliant. A lot of colour and space were wasted to illustrate the fact…
Here is the (almost) finalised program for the our section on the Radical Right in Perspective, organised under the auspices of the ECPR’s 5th General Conference (Potsdam, September 10-12), boasting about 50 papers.
I have left Britain’s Best Politics Department (™) for my alma mater, which (oddly enough) wants me back.
My article on Contextual Factors (unemployment, immigration, other parties) and the Extreme Right vote in Western Europe between 1980 and 2002 was yesterday published in the American Journal of Political Science (online). Obviously, I’m absolutely chuffed. The DOI (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00369.x) does not work yet, but the link to Wiley Interscience does. Here is the full bibliographic…
As a light-hearted follow-up to my post on the growth of the database state in the UK, here is a link to boing-boings [caption id="" align="alignright" width="426" caption="Well done, junior!"][/caption] “remix the British Transport Police’s paranoid turn-in your neighbour posters” campaign. Most of the pictures sent in are really good, and many of them look…
No western democracy has more surveillance cameras per citizen than the UK, and few European countries are collecting data on their citizens on such an Orwellian scale. The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has assessed 46 major government databases, and the result is devastating. About a quarter is almost certainly unlawful.