terça-feira, março 13, 2012

Polls in Portugal since the June 2011 elections

With the latest Aximage poll, this is where we stand in terms of voting intentions since the June 2011 elections. A linear trend instead of fancier stuff just seemed simple and informative enough.



















Bad news for the President too. At Aximage, 60% disapproval. In the latest Marktest, 61% disapproval. Yikes! In the latest Eurosondagem, much better, but still declining pretty steeply. Sure, everybody in power suffers with a bad economy, but it's clear that there's more to this.

segunda-feira, março 12, 2012

Elections in Europe since 2004

This is from a paper I'm still writing with Josep Colomer, but the figures seemed so interesting I couldn't resist sharing them even before the paper's finished. Here's the relative change for the party of the incumbent Prime Minister in comparison with the previous election, for all legislative elections from 2004 to 2011 in all EU27 + Iceland and Croatia.



And this is the same splitting the PM's parties in Left (<5) vs. Right (>5), on the basis of 0-10 expert scores that can be obtained in the Parlgov website.




sexta-feira, março 02, 2012

Finally, a clear and objective explanation of the Portuguese economic crisis

"Labour and capital were diverted into activities, such as law, construction, health and government, that are sheltered from foreign competition. The number of lawyers increased by 48% between 2000 and 2010. The public sector grew fast. 'All these people went to study film-making and sociology and then got jobs with the government,' says Pedro Santa Clara of Lisbon’s Nova University. Productivity stagnated."

You can find this and more in an obscure publication called The Economist. Let's hope this sociology and film-making people getting government jobs problem is addressed in a revised version of the Troika memorandum.