Political Data in 2018: Introducing the 2018 Political Data Yearbook

Abstract

The overviews in the yearbook for the past two years have highlighted instability at both the domestic and international levels (Bågenholm and Weeks, 2017; Bågenholm and Clark, 2018). By 2018, it is worth observing that the key continuity from what had gone before is, and is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, uncertainty in many, if not most, countries. Indeed, given the political and cultural conflicts playing themselves out in many advanced democracies, the unpredictability of events appears to be both a short-term feature, and arguably crucial to the ultimate resolution of these conflicts in the longer term. Politically, in Germany, another Grand Coalition between the CDU/CSU-SPD was agreed, but the year saw power begin to slip away from Chancellor Angela Merkel. A beacon of European stability to many, Merkel was replaced as party secretary by Annegret Kamp-Karrenbauer. Merkel announced that she would stand down as Chancellor at the end of the parliamentary term. In Italy, Matteo Salvini's Lega and the inexperienced Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) formed a populist government led by a little-known law professor, Guiseppe Conte. The coalition was riven by internal conflicts from the start, with Salvini's effectively permanent campaigning mode easily overshadowing both Conte and M5S's Luigi Di Maio. Australia continued a remarkable run with the Liberal Party's Scott Morrison becoming its fifth Prime Minister in as many years. The results of 2016's so-called populist revolts in America and the UK continued to make themselves felt, with the Trump Presidency continuing on its uncertain and unconventional way, and stalemate between parliament and the May-led government over Brexit. There were mixed performances economically. Israel performed well, growing at 3.3%, and with a low unemployment rate of 4%. Spain grew at 2.9% while Portugal grew by 2.6%. Unemployment on the Iberian peninsula remained high however, at 15.6% in Spain, and down from 9.6 to 7.6% in Portugal. Sweden grew at 2.3%, albeit with a slowing economy predicted in the short to medium-term for the country, and unemployment at 7%. Greece grew at 1.9% and exited its bailout agreement with its international 'troika' of creditors. Portugal also exited international financial supervision. Yet in numerous countries, there were signs that not all was well. Ireland, for example, highlighted last year as being on the road to recovery after the financial crisis, experienced a major problem of homelessness during 2018 which looked far from being resolved at year's end. Immigration, asylum and integration continued to be salient and controversial issues in many countries, leading to policy disagreements and electoral upsets. By the end of the year the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had won representation

Political Data in 2019: Introducing the 2020 Political Data Yearbook

“…Elections were plentiful in 2019 among the countries included in Yearbook . The year 2019 reports 14 lower house elections, five upper house elections and four presidential elections. Regional elections have taken place in 12 countries; and citizens of four countries voted in national referendums.…”

“…With respect to female representation in Parliament, the modest increase in the share of female MPs from 2018 (Clark and Meijers, 2019) continued, from 29.1 per cent of female representatives to 30 per cent. Yet, in nine of the 37 countries, there was a female parliamentary majority.…”

New kids on the ballot: The party-level determinants of new party success

“…One reason is the lack of data on new parties. Standard resources in party politics research such as ParlGov (Döring and Manow, 2019) or the Political Data Yearbook (Clark and Meijers, 2019) include parties only when they have achieved a certain share of the vote. While electoral commissions in some countries, such as the Netherlands, do publish the results for all participating parties, in other countries, such as Germany, unsuccessful parties are grouped as ‘others’ by the electoral commission.…”

Explaining the Homogeneous Diffusion of Covid-19 Policies among Heterogenous Countries

“…paper modeling time to adoption for five different social-distancing interventions among US States, Adolph et al (2020) highlight the political nature of within-US policy diffusion by showing how Republican governors, and governors from states with more Trump supporters, were slower to adopt social-distancing interventions. To distinguish the influence of political structure (level of electoral democracy) from that of political ideology, we therefore examined Adolph et al's thesis of policy emulation as a politically driven process by including a coefficient measuring the politically dominant party or party group in each country as 'right-leaning', 'left-leaning', or 'mixed' from the European Consortium for Political Research's Political Data Yearbook(Clark & Meijers, 2019).31 The coefficient from this variable only marginally affected the speed of policy diffusion in our main model specification (hazard ratio: 0.483, p < 0.05) and dot not alter the effects of 'adoption density'…”