RE-DESIGN

Olympic medals, economic power and population size

Published by demetriodor on August 24, 2016

The 2016 Rio Olympic games being officially over, we can obsess as much as we like with the final medal table, without the distraction of having to actually watch any sports. One of the basic questions to ponder about the medal table is to what extent Olympic glory is determined by the wealth, economic power and population size of the countries. Many news outlets quickly calculated the ratios of the 2016 medal count with economic power and population size per country and presented the rankings of ‘medals won per billion of GDP’ and ‘medals won per million of population’ (for example here and here). But while these rankings are fun, they give us little idea about the relationships between economic power and population size, on the one hand, and Olympic success, on the other. Obviously, there are no deterministic links, but there could still be systematic relationships. So let’s see. Data I pulled from the Internet the total number of medals won at the 2016 Olympic games and assigned each country a score in the following way: each country got 5 points for a gold medal, 3 points for silver, and 1 point for bronze. (Different transformations of medals into points are of course possible.) To measure wealth and economic power, I got the GDP (at purchasing power parity) estimates for 2015 provided by the International Monetary Fund, complemented by data from the CIA Factbook (both sets of numbers available here). For population size, I used the Wikipedia list available…

The Commission’s plan for reforming EU asylum policy is very ambitious. But can it work?

Published by demetriodor on May 12, 2016

Note: A 3,000-word analysis of reform plans that are probably never gonna see the light of day anyways, based on simple arithmetics and not-so-simple simulations. Also, an excuse to do graphs. Re-posted from Eurosearch. The European Commission announced last Wednesday a new package of proposals designed to reform the EU asylum system. The proposals include compulsory redistribution of asylum applications among the EU member states. This is called ‘corrective allocation mechanism’ or ‘fairness mechanism’. Countries would be allocated ‘reference shares’ of asylum applications, and the moment a country’s reference share is exceeded by 50%, an automatic system will set it that will send the excess asylum applicants to countries that have not attained their reference shares yet. If member states do not cooperate, they will have to pay a ‘solidarity contribution’ of €250,000 for every asylum application they refuse to process. The proposal for compulsory redistribution backed by the threat of financial penalties (sorry, solidarity contributions) is very ambitious. But can it work? And I mean, can it work in a strictly technical sense, provided that the EU musters the political support to adopt the proposals[1], manages to make the member states comply with the rules, ensures that they don’t game the national asylum statistics, and so on – additional problems that are by no means trivial to solve. Let’s also leave aside for the moment the normative issue whether such a compulsory redistribution system is fair, to asylum seekers and to the EU member states. For now, the simpler question –…

5 simple things to know about asylum policy in the European Union

Published by demetriodor on September 16, 2015

Migration is quickly turning into the defining issue of our time. This might sound cliché, but is true. Not only does migration top the list of most important problems facing society, but it is also divisive in a way no other issue is. Unlike problems like inequality or the environment, immigration polarizes and divides opinions of ordinary people in a manner that cuts through social classes, education levels, age groups, and political affiliations. Divisions and bitter disagreements run even within families and close circles of friends. For no other issue do I see on my Facebook wall the full gamut of opinions ranging from strong rejection of migrants and refugees to their unconditional welcome and embrace. Most opinions of course fall somewhere in-between expressing, for example, support for `genuine’ refugees fleeing war but not for economic migrants, or for Christian but not for Muslim immigrants; yet, deep and important disagreements remain. The current crisis with the influx of hundreds-of-thousands asylum-seekers in Europe in the summer of 2015 is only but the current episode of the unfolding migration drama. The crisis and the political responses to it bring powerful emotions in people: fear and compassion, anger and humility, empathy and contempt. Together with polarization, emotions further cloud the discussion of asylum policies and the right thing for the European countries to do in this situation. In response, I want to share five simple things I happen to know about asylum policies in the EU. I am by no means a specialist on…

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

Published by demetriodor on May 11, 2015

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…

Immigration from Central and Eastern Europe fuels support for Eurosceptic parties in the UK

Published by demetriodor on May 4, 2015

Combining political, demographic and economic data for the local level in the UK, we find that the presence of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is related to higher voting shares cast for parties with Eurosceptic positions at the 2014 elections for the European Parliament. Evidence across Europe supports the connection between immigration from CEE and the electoral success of anti-Europe and anti-immigration political parties.

Visualizing asylum statistics

Published by demetriodor on May 30, 2014

Note: of potential interest to R users for the dynamic Google chart generated via googleVis in R and discussed towards the end of the post. Here you can go directly to the graph. An emergency refugee center, opened in September 2013 in an abandoned school in Sofia, Bulgaria. Photo by Alessandro Penso, Italy, OnOff Picture. First prize at World Press Photo 2013 in the category General News (Single). The tragic lives of asylum-seekers make for moving stories and powerful photos. When individual tragedies are aggregated into abstract statistics, the message gets harder to sell. Yet, statistics are arguably more relevant for policy and provide for a deeper understanding, if not as much empathy, than individual stories. In this post, I will offer a few graphs that present some of the major trends and patterns in the numbers of asylum applications and asylum recognition rates in Europe over the last twelve years. I focus on two issues: which European countries take the brunt of the asylum flows, and the link between the application share that each country gets and its asylum recognition rate. Asylum applications and recognition rates Before delving into the details, let’s look at the big picture first. Each year between 2001 and 2012, 370,000 people on average have applied for asylum protection in one of the member states of the European Union (plus Norway and Switzerland). As can be seen from Figure 1, the number fluctuates between 250,000 and 500,000 per year, and there is no clear trend. Altogether, during this 12-year period, approximately 4.5 million…

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