Coalition Analysis (KOALA) 2017

Abstract

With the German Election on September 24th approaching, interest in election coverage increases. The most important question of interest is ‘Which parties will form the governing coalition?’ Sadly, discussing this question, media outlets and pundits mostly focus on raw voting intention polls and simply add up percentages to determine if a majority for two or more parties is possible. In this talk, we are going to explain why this approach is problematic and present an alternative, developed by the Statistical Consulting Unit (StaBLab) in collaboration with ZEIT ONLINE. Our method is implemented in the Open Source R-package coalitions, results are hosted online via an interactive shiny app and updates are automatically posted on twitter. In summary, we will talk about the upcoming election, implementation of our method in R, our shiny app and integration with twitter.