Reading Politics

Alan Renwick

Political scientists get very excited about Eurovision.  That’s partly just because most people get very excited about Eurovision and political scientists – contrary to popular belief – are not that different from everyone else.  But political scientists get excited for another reason too: Eurovision gives us lots of lots of opportunities to do fun political science.

A quick search for “Eurovision Song Contest” on Google Scholar gets more than three thousand hits.  There’s a whole cottage industry in “eurovisiopsephology” out there.  Probably the hottest issue in the academic literature concerns the evolution of voting blocs.  Numerous studies examine the Wogan hypothesis: that political voting, which was once restricted to an innocent vote swap between Greece and Cyprus, has become ubiquitous.[1]  Some studies (such as this one) back Terry up.  Others suggest things are more complex.  Writing in the august European Journal of Political Economy, for example, Ginsburgh and Noury conclude that cultural proximity matters more than vote trading.  In other words, the Greeks vote for the Cypriots because they really like the way the Cypriots sing, not because they expect votes in return.  And we voted for Jedward last year not because we feel uniquely close to the Irish but because we actually really like Jedward.

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Alan Renwick

How many electoral candidates are voters able meaningfully to choose between?  This is an important question for anyone thinking about designing or evaluating different electoral systems.

Voters often say that they want more choice: ‘voter choice’ was identified as a key desideratum by citizens’ assemblies that investigated electoral reform options in British Columbia and Ontario in 2004 and 2007; it was also highlighted in focus groups conducted by David Farrell and Michael Gallagher in the UK in the late 1990s.

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In this post, Spyridon Plakoudas, a second-year PhD student in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Reading, analyses the outcome of last weekend’s parliamentary elections in Greece.

The May 2012 deputy elections in Greece have stimulated interest in the political affairs of a small nation susceptible to political crises. Labelled the most crucial elections in modern Greek political history, the results of the ballot validated only partially that characterisation. Certainly, these elections witnessed a war of ideas: the pro-austerity parties propagated reputedly the only reliable exit strategy from the economic quagmire, whereas their political rivals propagated an allegedly decent response to the concession of national sovereignty to Greece’s foreign lenders.

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PhD student Ben Whitham writes here about how the erroneous nature of many causal claims in the media and how they might best be overcome.

The Telegraph published an article last week, based on a research publication from Griffith University in Australia, under the headline ‘Strong men more likely to vote Conservative’. The Griffith University study of ‘actors known for their physical strength and formidability, among them Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone’ apparently concludes that they are ‘more likely than not to support the Republican position on foreign policy’ and to support ‘military action’. Thus a pattern is ostensibly established between ‘upper body strength in adult males’ and a tendency to ‘take the more right wing view – be it Conservative in the UK or Republican in the US’. The claim, captured by the Telegraph headline, is that, to some extent, physical build causes political allegiance. Upper body strength is, the article contends, ‘a crucial variable’ that causally ‘impacts on a wide range of mental mechanisms’.

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Patrick Porter

I’m very much looking forward to attending this year’s International Studies Association conference in lovely San Diego. This is partly because I can fight a losing struggle against its declared theme for this year:

‘Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” and coined the term “global village.” McLuhan died in 1980, but his insights are even more relevant today. The information environment is drastically different from that of even a decade ago, as new forms of information flows come into existence almost annually.

Facebook now has over 500 million users, and Twitter, a service barely in existence three years ago, counts over 175 million users. These tools are not only for finding long-lost school friends or sharing pictures of loved ones: they often are used for political purposes. For instance, both text messages and tweets served as vital communication tools during the 2010 post-election protests in Iran. Indeed, Reuters reported that United States government went so far as to ask Twitter to postpone maintenance and maintain service during this time.’

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Patrick Porter

Alan Renwick

The UK government has just squashed a proposal to ditch the Alternative Vote (AV) electoral system in favour of First Past the Post.

This may come as a surprise to many readers: after all, the British people voted comprehensively against AV in a referendum last May, so surely there is no AV system for the government defend, even if it wants to.

But we are not talking here about general elections.  Rather, we are talking about the election of chairs of House of Commons select committees.  And in defending the use of AV to fill these positions, the government have chalked up a valuable success for sensible policy-making over yah-boo posturing.

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Today we carry a guest post by Dr David Chuter on the coming French presidential elections.  Dr Chuter worked extensively with the French political system during his government career, including three years in the French Defence Ministry, and has written widely on issues related to modern French political history, especially in the security area. He is also an expert on a wide range of matters relating to the security sector, war crimes, and political violence.  He retired from the Ministry of Defence in 2008 and is now a writer, lecturer, and consultant on security issues based in Paris.  He has written four books, most recently “Governing and Managing the Defence Sector” (2011). His personal website is www.davidchuter.com

“ If Sarkozy is re-elected” said a friend recently “it’ll be a disaster for France. But if the only alternative is Hollande ….” Followed an untranslatable Gallic shrug. A lot of people in France think like that these days, and indeed victory by apathy may be the only realistic strategy Sarkozy has left. The elections themselves have been carefully timed to fall in the Easter holidays, when many of those least likely to vote for him (the young, couples with children, anyone who works in education) will be away, and when much of his core vote (the elderly and the prosperous) are assumed to be around to be mobilised. Meanwhile, according to the latest polls, about half of potential voters in the lower socio-economic groups may not even bother, seeing no point in voting for anyone. That may do the trick. But if it doesn’t, we may be on the verge of something really spectacular.

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Patrick Porter

In a reflective post on The Duck of Minerva not long ago, Robert E. Kelly noted:

We are elated that the Libya operation worked, (against all odds given the Iraq experience and what we know about foreign intervention in LDCs generally). Lots of Duck writers supported the intervention. (I found Jon Western’s arguments last spring particularly persuasive; some of my writing on Libya is here and here.) Even if you didn’t support it, and worried that it meant more ‘empire,’ it still tugged at your heartstrings to see Libyans fighting and dying against a nasty tyrant. So you probably supported the NATO intervention even though you didn’t want to.

Robert is probably right that most Duck writers did respond this way. Personally, I didn’t.

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