Monthly Archives: May 2012
Predictions: Egyptian presidential election
The first round of Egypt’s presidential election is tomorrow, which means it’s time for everybody to make their predictions. I think the biggest story of late has been the surprise surge of former Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq. I say surprise, although an Egyptian friend has been predicting his success for some time now. It’s difficult to get a handle on the race because the polling has been rather erratic. With that being said, I think it’s possible to analyze some of the polls and make some comments.
I created a poll of polls, using Al Masry Al Youm’s and Al-Ahram’s weekly surveys. I chose these two because they were the only ones to be released at nearly identical times for seven weeks.
A couple thoughts and random speculations on these numbers:
The two sets of surveys had some notable differences. Al Masry Al Youm’s had a far higher number of undecided voters (It would have been nice to know how the questions were worded). Al-Ahram, on the other hand, gave a slight edge to several candidates, most notably, Amr Moussa. In fact, Moussa polled on average 23 points higher in Al-Ahram polls than Masry’s. It looks like Al-Ahram was pushing respondents harder to make a decision, as its lower undecided number produced higher numbers for every major candidate. The fact that Moussa gained so much from this group, could indicate that a lot of the support we see for him in these surveys is not solidified, or even committed to voting. This would support the narrative that from the beginning, Moussa was largely running so strong due to name recognition.
People aren’t that undecided. One of the most notable aspects of these polls is the high number of undecideds in the race. Al-Masry Al-Youm even has 33 percent of all voters listed as undecided in their last poll. The thing is, the surveys also have a very high number of people claiming they will vote. In fact, the last poll shows that 87 percent of all registered voters will turn out. Voter turnout models are hard, US pollsters still struggle with it, but these firms still need a better screen. Turnout in the recent parliamentary polls was around 54 percent. The difference between those two numbers (87 and 54) is roughly the number of undecideds in their poll. I’m definitely not claiming that all the undecideds did not vote in the last election, and will not vote in this one. But I do think it’s safe to assume that opinions are a bit more solidified at this stage in the race. We probably shouldn’t speculate about where this mass number of undecideds will go. They might not go anywhere.
Shafiq’s surge is real. According the poll of polls, Shafiq is in second place with 21 percent of the vote. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsy and Hamdeen Sabahi are also enjoying small surges, although remain far behind. Shafiq was smart in having a strong ground operation and playing to his base. He probably also took note of the brief surge of Omr Suleiman, which showed that their was a constituency for a law and order candidate. Shafiq didn’t try to straddle several social cleavages (like Moussa and Fotouh), he just built a base within one group and developed a clear message.
We get to see if in Egypt, the Party decides. Morsy is enjoying a late surge but still looks like he will fall short of the top two. This seems like a great opportunity to really see the strength of the Brotherhood’s ground operation. Morsy doesn’t have the personal popularity of other candidates. If he alone polls far better than the surveys indicated, we can probably infer a lot about the MB’s grassroots strength.
Final Predictions: Shafiq and Moussa win the first round, although a strong possibility that it will be Shafiq and Morsy.
Greece, bonus seats, and PR
Greece held parliamentary elections on Sunday in which the two historic largest parties were battered at the polls while parties on the extreme right and left performed disturbingly well. The top party, New Democracy (ND) received less votes than it did in the previous election (19 percent compared to 33 percent) yet actually finished with 17 more seats than before. How did this happen?
Greece has a strange system where the party that receives the most votes gets an additional 50 seats (up from 40 during the last election) in parliament. So while there are 300 seats in the Vouli ton Ellinon, parties only really compete for 250 while the last 50 are allocated separately. The point of this, I’m assuming, is to ensure that one party or coalition has a governing majority. It obviously failed in this election as even with the bonus, ND will still just get 36 percent of all seats.[1]
Greece’s system is a great example of how an ostensibly proportional system can perform very unproportionally. Small degrees of over-representation are consistent with most nationwide PR systems but Greece’s tends to highly exaggerate the top party while mitigating the natural bonus that we would see for the other parties. The 50 bonus seats are calculated based on the national vote total. Invalid votes are disregarded for seat allocation purposes as are votes for parties that fall below the 3 percent threshold. Therefore, we should normally expect to see most parties that enter parliament get a slightly higher percentage of seats than their raw vote total would suggest. For example, in this election, it seems all parties that entered parliament would have been over represented if you did not factor in the bonus seats (so a parliament of 250). Syriza would have received nearly 21 percent of seats for getting only 17 percent of the vote and New Democracy would have still received 23 percent for getting only 19 percent of the vote. (Figure 1) All parties, however, would have done better than their percent of the popular vote would indicate.
Figure 1 (Click to enlarge)
With the bonus, however, ND received a 17 percent boost from their raw vote total (36 percent of all seats with only 19 percent of the popular vote), while Syriza stayed at basically the same level. The other parties, however, got around a fraction of a percent less of the seat total than their popular vote would have indicated. This somewhat has the effect of awarding all wasted votes to New Democracy. That last column in Figure 1 shows how the bonus affected that party’s seat total compared to a parliament without the 50 bonus seats.
Attempting to create a governing majority has some understandable justifications, but what happens when no party can get that majority anyway? Now Greece’s system just gave a massive boost to one party, without anything to really show for it. In order for a party to win a majority of seats it would have to win approximately 39 percent of the vote, at a minimum. This was a number that was calculated prior to the election, so maybe it could be possible to stipulate that no party wins the bonus unless it reaches that level? Comments or corrections welcome.
[1] I was unaware of any other country that has a bonus system until a friend pointed me towards Italy, which guarantees 340 seats to the top-performing party. (This is somewhat unsettling, as I have already heard some people compare the performance of the extreme right and left in this election to famous elections in Italy and Germany. I don’t think we need to fret about fascism coming to Greece but it never hurts to reread Giovanni Sartori.)
Ahwa Talk 