Falling below the threshold

This afternoon I went to a seminar at McGill University where there was a presentation on how voters perceive coalitions, with Germany as example. The scholar Sven-Oliver Proksch used the most recent coalition between the liberal party FDP and the Christian Democrats CDU as  a case. In the election last Sunday the FDP did not manage to reach the threshold level 5 percent. What could be the reasons FDP did not make it this time?

There are some possible explanations:
- Small parties are punished when included in government together with a dominant party, since their ideological profile becomes less clear
- The opinion polls were not "alarming" enough to make people insurance vote for the FDP. The survey panel study of the Swedish voters I did in spring 2013 (published as a debate article in Dagens Nyheter 30 May) show that low, even very low, poll levels may be benificial for small parties' electoral fortune 
- There were other alternatives than the FDP, both to the left and to the right. There was also a general perception that the CDU had been, and is, handling the state, especially the economy, well.

I also spoke to one of my Swedish colleagues in Montréal, Elin Naurin. She was amazed thas 73 percent of the participants in the German (representative) Internet survey study could correctly mention which parties were part of the current coalition. In Sweden people in general are not very well aware of which parties are a part of government. Government (regering) is often confused with parliament (riksdag) was Naurin's argument.
However, it may be that the awareness  has changed the last few elections when the centre-right "Alliance" has become a concept. Perhaps  we will see other constellations in September 2014, when there is a general election in Sweden. 

Theory of games

Now autumn has arrived in Montreal, almost overnight: the air is fresh and cold and trees have started to color. Personally I have also started something new: taking a course in Game theory at the Department of Economics at Concordia University, one of the English speaking universities in downtown Montreal. In the room at the 11th floor, I have already become more familiar with the core of game theory and examples such as Prisoner's dilemma: sometimes what's best for oneself as an individual is not best for the society as a whole. Another interesting example is "The battle of sexes". If we are a couple, and one wants to go to a concert and the other to sports, what should we choose? Repeated games could be one solution, given that both give the highest value to being together.

The course in Game theory is supposed to be a theoretical base for my upcoming lab experiment on strategic voting. I am currently working on the research design and it will be interesting to see how it works out.