title: 'coalitions: Coalition probabilities in multi-party democracies' tags: - coalitions - rstats - coalition probabilities - political science authors: - name: Andreas Bender orcid: 0000-0001-5628-8611 affiliation: "1" - name: Alexander Bauer orcid: 0000-0003-3495-5131 affiliation: 1 affiliations: - name: Statistical Consulting Unit, StaBLab, LMU Munich index: 1 date: 03 March 2018 bibliography: paper.bib
In multi-party democracies, election coverage usually focuses on raw results from polls on questions like
Who would you vote for if the election was tomorrow?
Whether a coalition (union of multiple parties) will obtain enough votes to form a governing coalition is discussed by adding up votes obtained by the parties in question, while ignoring sample uncertainty and redistribution of votes for parties beneath a specific threshold (e.g., 5% in Germany).
The R [@R] package coalitions
[@coalitions_zenodo] implements methods that overcome those shortcomings and quantifies sample uncertainty in terms of probabilities for events of interest. Specifically, it contains functions to
To get started
An example for the (backend) application of the package can be found at
where it is applied to German (federal and state wide) elections/surveys.
Currently, the functionality focuses on German federal and state-wide elections. However, it can be easily extended to other multi-party democracies, given the user can obtain the necessary data and transform it to a suitable format. For example, the methods have been successfully applied to calculate coalition probabilities for the 2017 elections in Austria. Contributions are welcome at: https://github.com/adibender/coalitions
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