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Category: Voting and elections

Government positions from party-level Manifesto data (with R)

In empirical research in political science and public policy, we often need estimates of the political positions of governments (cabinets) and the salience of different issues for different governments (cabinets). Data on policy positions and issue salience is available, but typically at the level of political parties. One prominent source of data for issue salience and positions is the Manifesto Corpus, a database of the electoral manifestos of political parties. To ease the aggregation of government positions and salience from party-level Manifesto data, I developed a set of functions in R that accomplish just that, combining the Manifesto data with data on the duration and composition of governments from ParlGov. The see how the functions work, read this detailed tutorial. You can access all the functions at the dedicated GitHub repository. And you can contribute to this project by forking the code on GitHub. If you have questions or suggestions, get in touch. Enjoy!

Why political scientists should continue to (fail to) predict elections?

The results from the British elections last week already claimed the heads of three party leaders. But together with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and UKIP, there was another group that lost big time in the elections: pollsters and electoral prognosticators. Not only were polls and predictions way off the mark in terms of the actual vote shares and seats received by the different parties. Crucially, their major expectation of a hung parliament did not materialize as the Conservatives cruised into a small but comfortable majority of the seats. Even more remarkably, all polls and predictions were wrong, and they were all wrong pretty much in the same way. Not pretty. This calls for reflection upon the exploding number of electoral forecasting models which sprung up during the build-up to the 2015 national elections in the UK. Many of these models were offered by political scientists and promoted by academic institutions (for example, here, here, and here). At some point, it became passé to be a major political science institution in the country and not have an electoral forecast. The field became so crowded that the elections were branded as ‘a nerd feast’ and the competition of predictions as ‘the battle of the nerds’. The feast is over and everyone lost. It is the time of the scavengers. The massive failure of British polls and predictions has already led to a frenzy of often vicious attacks on the pollsters and prognosticators coming from politicians, journalists and pundits, in the UK and beyond. A formal inquiry has…

New data source for political science researchers

Political Data Yearbook Interactive is a new source for data on election results, turnout and government composition for all EU and some non-European countries. It is basically an online version of the yearbooks that ECPR printed as part of the European Journal for Political Research for many years now. The interactive online tool has some (limited) visualization options and can export data in several formats.

The most successful party family in Europe?!

“The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe.” (Cas Mudde, Stein Rokkan Lecture published in the latest issue of the European Journal of Political Research) I hope this is a typo or some other type of unintentional misunderstanding. How can the populist radical right be the most successful party family when they have never gotten more than 16% of the votes outside Austria and Switzerland (according to Table 1 in the same lecture)?   Mudde, C. A. S. “Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe: So What?” European Journal of Political Research 52, no. 1 (2013): 1-19. Abstract The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so-called ‘verrechtsing’ (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition…

Hedging the bets: The US election outcome in the Dutch press

This is a guest post by Markus Haverland, Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam and author of a recent book on research methods. *** Causal knowledge about the world proceeds by testing hypotheses. The context of discovery precedes the context of justification. We all know that journalists and pundits often do it the other way around: providing for an explanation after the fact. A particularly hilarious example can be found in today’s issue of “Spits”, a Dutch daily newspaper. Anticipating that the result of the elections for the president of the US would arrive after the newspapers went to press, the newspaper prepared for both situations. It has turned the backpage into a second frontpage. Depending on the results the reader is advised to either read the frontpage or the backpage. On both pages the well-known  Dutch journalists, a former correspondent in Washington, Charles Groenhuijsen analyses the results. On the “Obama wins” page he explains that it was evident that Obama would win, because he is a better campaigner and Romney’s economic program is inconsistent. On the “Romney  wins”  page he explains this outcome, by stating that, ultimately, the US is a conservative country, that voters were afraid of a turn to the left, laws against gun possession, and tolerance towards gay marriage, and that voters thought he was not effectively dealing with the economic crisis.

No use for big data in electioneering, according to Hollywood

Over the last year two major Hollywood movies that touch upon the use of big data and sophisticated data analysis hit the big screen. Which, of course, is two more than the mean (or was that the median). Moneyball shows how crunching numbers helps win baseball games and Margin Call shows how crunching numbers helps ruin financial firms. It’s kind of fun to see Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey stare at spreadsheets and nod approvingly while being explained some statistical subtleties. But watching someone stare at somebody else’s spreadsheets quickly becomes tiresome … which probably explains why Regressing with the Stars, Dotchart Master, and America’s Next Multilevel Model haven’t yet taken over reality TV. So I was really disappointed to see that a third 2011 movie – The Ides of March – misses a golden opportunity to show the use of big data and sophisticated analysis for winning elections. The movie revolves around the primary presidential campaign of George Clooney (pardon, Governor Mike Morris) and the dirty politics behind the scenes. But for Hollywood in 2011, electioneering is still a game of horse-trading, media spinning and good-ol’ stabs in the back. All these things about election campaigns are probably true, but I was disappointed that there were no fancy graphs plotting approval ratings and prediction market quotes, no real-time election forecasts (or nowcasts) at which  George Clooney to stare and nod approvingly, no GIS-supported campaign targeting, not even focus groups, twits, facebook pages, not to speak of google circles. Now,…