Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Monday, December 06, 2010

Too late for analysis?

When I actually do some research, I actually find useful and interesting things. Would you like your students to analyze last year's presidential election results in Iran? Would you like them to compare the 2009 results with those from 2005?

The Guardian (UK) does that, but it also has published all the raw data. You can present the data to your students and ask them to offer explanations for the changes between 2005 and 2009 and for the anomalies is the 2009 results.

The Iranian election results, by province
Includes a link to a .pdf map of results by province

Analysis: Iran election statistics muddy waters further
Amid a swirl of rumour, two alternative sets of statistics purporting to represent the reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi as the "true" winner of Iran's disputed presidential election have been circulating in Tehran.

Their authenticity is impossible to gauge. One set, attributed to an "informed source" in the interior ministry and appearing on Iranian opposition websites, shows Mousavi winning 21.3m votes, or 57.2% of the total – enough to give him outright victory without a second-round run-off…

Two US think tank analysts said today that the official results were consistent with an independent telephone poll they conducted three weeks before the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a two to one margin.

Ken Ballen, the president of Terror Free Tomorrow: The Center for Public Opinion, which studies attitudes toward extremism, and Patrick Doherty, of the New America Foundation, wrote in today's Washington Post: "While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead".

See also: Interactive: How Iran is Governed
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