With all that is going pear-shaped in the world, you would be forgiven not to be aware of the latest instalment in the Great Greek Political Drama Series. It actually had a rather long lead: The current president’s term was coming to an end, and Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the radical left opposition faction…
Even the Washington Post has woken up to the fact that 25 years after the uprising in the GDR, Germany stubbornly remains divided economically, politically, and socially. In the great scheme of things, this may matter less than you might think: In Western Europe alone, the UK, Spain, Belgium, or Switzerland – countries that have…
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…
This week, guest-blogging at the LSE’s very useful European Politics and Policy blog: Why I think that the AfD’s likely success in the 2014 European election will give them a foothold in the German system.
By and large, the online “Green Primary” ahead of the Euro 2014 election was a failure. Deutsche Welle has a short feature on this experiment, in which I give my five (Euro) cent. Der Beitrag zur “Primary” ist auch auf Deutsch verfügbar. Photo by DBarefoot
In Germany, people begin to realise that Merkel may have painted herself into a corner by winning so gloriously. While her Christian Democrats are by far the largest party group in the new Bundestag, she needs a coalition partner, but nobody wants to play. Merkel may have painted herself into a corner by winning so gloriously. This could still end in new elections or a minority government
I’ve been pooling the German pre-election polls since early this summer, and have published preliminary findings since August. People keep asking me the same questions, so here is my FAQ on pooling the polls.
You may download the code and most recent replication data for my model that estimates latent party support and brazenly predicts the outcome of the 2013 German election from my dataverse. If you spot a bug or some other problem, please drop me a line.
Many of the activities parties would have done in-house during a campaign in bygone times have now been outsourced to agencies. Today’s leftfield exhibit is from the Pirate party.