About

Welcome to WorldElections.com

What this is… and is not.

This blog was founded with the objective of providing neutral, reliable and interesting coverage and analysis in English of elections and referendums around the world. This blog may jump around a whole lot from country to country, but I intend to cover the electoral happenings in most democratic countries. There are, however, way too many electoral events around the world for everything to be covered, and I recognize that this blog is far from exhaustive.  Some elections won’t be covered at all, often because they’re rigged or boring, but sometimes because I don’t have the knowledge to talk about them. Similarly, I do not go into great details about elections where I know next to nothing about the local situation.

I do not cover (for the most part) non-partisan elections, obscure local elections, local by-elections and a good deal of by-elections; unless I have knowledge and interest in them to talk about them, and if I feel the election in question was important enough to warrant a post.

I love maps, and I love electoral geography. Therefore, I always strive to make a map of the election being discussed. Maps tell us, better than anything, the real story of the election and tell us where the election was won and why it was won. Most of my base maps are from websites such as the World Gazetteer or various maps stolen from Wikipedia or found on other websites. Other maps I have edited or created myself.

My philosophy about elections is that analysis of patterns and larger trends are far more interesting than stale statistics and percentages, and that the fascinating thing about most elections are the links between results and demographic, geopolitical or historical patterns. Moreover, I always like to provide a cursory background of the country or region in question, providing details about its history, economy or society which have links – even if not immediately obvious – with the specific election. History offers insights into voting patterns and behaviours of parties which are crucial to really understanding elections.

I don’t like analyzing elections by just telling you that in constituency x, candidate a polled x% of the vote, a change of x% since last time. That doesn’t tell us anything except confuse us with a bunch of numbers. I much prefer to look beyond the boring percentages and raw data to look into the questions which are really interesting: why did this place vote this way? how did it come to be like this? what were the issues of importance here?

I have a bad tendency to write very long posts and ramble on a lot, because I find it interesting. That is why most of my posts are long or very long, but hopefully they are interesting.

Finally, as a point of order, this is a blog on world elections and referendums; not a blog on the daily politics and political happenings of other countries. Similarly, this is most certainly not a blog for my personal rants which nobody cares about, entertaining stupid rumours or mindless partisan blabber about useless things. A number of blogs and news sites already serve that purpose.

A calendar of upcoming elections is available through Google Calendars here.

The editor

I am a dual French and Canadian citizen, and I live in Ottawa, Ontario. I am studying political science at the University of Ottawa (Canada).

My interests, are, you might have guessed, comparative politics, electoral politics and political history. Beyond that, I have particular research interests in regionalism, the politics of ethnic minorities, federalism, electoral geography and electoral sociology. I have a deeper interest in French, Canadian, Spanish, Brazilian, Italian, Scandinavian, Benelux and Swiss politics; but I enjoy learning about and following politics in basically every country. While I try to learn as much as possible about politics in every country covered, at times my comments or analysis may have a few errors slipped in. Please make me aware of these errors.

This blog is non-partisan and neutral. I am not here to give my opinions about how politics and politicians in such a country are, or to analyse elections through the tinted glasses of partisanship. However, being entirely non-partisan is impossible, because everybody has biases. In some instances, it’s tougher to conceal your dislike for certain politicians or things, and inevitably that happens to me. But I try to be fair in portraying all actors, parties and events. Ideologically, I am a centrist social liberal.

Contact and Commenting

Dear editor may be contacted via email at glhermine<at>gmail.com, though I read and respond to (directly or privately) to all comments.

Comments which are deemed spam, commercial or unnecessary trash will be deleted. Racist, derogatory, insulting, or ultra-partisan (read, hackish) comments will not be approved. This is a blog of non-partisan electoral analysis, not of partisan debate or partisan politics. As a result, it is normal that comments which do not fit in with the objective of this blog will not be approved.