The Plot Politics Decoded

On June 8, 2015, U.S. President Barack Obama held a press conference after the G7 Summit in Schloss Elmau, Germany. Although the president spoke chiefly about the Summit, his answer to a reporter’s question about the Supreme Court’s pending decision concerning his signature health care reform policy set off a ...

The microblogging service Twitter has grown into a prominent space for political talk. Political campaigns, collective action, and public discourse leave traces in messages posted by users of the service. Analyzing Twiter messages for prominent topics, actors, or objects is easy but does this analysis offer insights of value to ...

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Left experienced an extraordinary revival in Latin America. In country after country, the so-called new Left managed to defeat the Center and the Right in free and fair election. In fact, by 2009 nearly two-thirds of Latin Americans lived under some form ...

The problem of tax evasion is at the core of much of the budgetary problems confronting Europe today. There is scarcely a German voter who hasn’t heard that if the Greeks and/or the Italians just paid the taxes they owe, these countries’ budget problems would vanish. Indeed, the cultural stereotyping ...

How can we usefully summarise the accuracy of an election opinion poll compared to the real result of an election? In this blog, we describe a score we have devised to allow people to see how different polls compare in their reflection of the final election result, no matter how ...

Before they emptied the ballot box to be counted, a group of poll workers semi-discretely placed a man in a puffy coat next to the table. As the (presumably legally cast) ballots were dropped on the table, the man in the puffy coat threw a stack of additional ballots in ...

Observational political science overwhelmingly involves phenomena that occur and change over time. Temporal dependencies abound both between and within many social processes. Of course, failing to account for temporal dependencies in dynamic data violates the classical regression assumptions. Yet unfortunately some analysts seem to view the dynamic processes in their ...

Climate change is one of the most debated issues of the 21st century. The debate is multifaceted, as it ranges from whether the phenomenon should constitute a top international concern to how information on greenhouse gases should be locally collected. Little is know, however, about which issues are most systematically ...

There is no doubting the single-minded determination of Australia’s Liberal government to be seen as the party of national security. Amidst the distinctive atmospherics of an approaching election, the past few months have witnessed Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his ministers, following in the footsteps of the government of the ...

It has become a commonplace of modern politics that most people in the UK take a dim view of their elected representatives. The 2009 MP expenses revelations and the subsequent drip-drip of sleaze are but the latest in a long series of scandals that have sent ripples over Britain’s political landscape. At the same time, outright corruption in UK politics is relatively rare in comparison to many other countries. An interesting and largely unanswered question is how the British people come to hold such negative views of their elected leaders, given that by international standards, British politicians are relatively clean.