Reading Time: 6 minutesSeries: “Election Forecasting: Between Statistics, Politics, and Uncertainty” — Election Forensics After an election, a second competition usually begins. Parties are no longer the only contestants. Pollsters, media outlets, commentators, and their critics start calculating who “got it right”, who “missed”, who came closest, and…

Reading Time: 6 minutesSeries: “Election Forecasting: Between Statistics, Politics, and Uncertainty” — Election Forensics This post continues my series on election forecasting, written for both specialists and readers who do not spend their evenings thinking about sampling frames, turnout models, and predictive distributions. I am currently preparing a…

Reading Time: 10 minutesSeries: “Election Forecasting: Between Statistics, Politics, and Uncertainty” — Election Forensics When a percentage looks more precise than it really is Imagine two television programmes discussing the forthcoming parliamentary election. On the first, an analyst confidently announces that List A will receive 41% of the…

Reading Time: 10 minutesSeries: “Election Forecasting: Between Statistics, Politics, and Uncertainty” — Election Forensics A new series: less fortune-telling, more understanding How many votes will Serbia's Student List win? How much support will the electoral list led by Aleksandar Vučić attract? Which parties will cross the electoral threshold,…

Reading Time: 9 minutesEurope’s democratic landscape in 2025 cannot be divided neatly into countries that are democratic and countries that are not. The revised dataset instead reveals several distinct patterns: established democracies that have lost part of their previous strength, countries that have improved modestly from relatively weak…

Reading Time: 8 minutesA country can improve compared with its own past and still remain behind its neighbours. It can also retain one of the region’s strongest election administrations while losing ground in media freedom, public debate and the broader conditions of political competition. This is why the…

Reading Time: 9 minutesPart 2. From Emotion to Political Rhetoric: How the Speech Builds Its Message Is the speech positive or negative? A first look at the Bing sentiment dictionary produces an apparently surprising result. Of the words recognised by the lexicon, 197 are classified as positive and…

Reading Time: 7 minutesPart 1. From Words to Themes: Mapping the Vocabulary of a Political Speech Introduction: What can text analysis tell us about a political speech? Political speeches are designed not merely to transmit information. They construct stories, identify groups, assign responsibility, evoke emotions, recall selected episodes…

Reading Time: 5 minutesIntroduction: why sentiment belongs to election forensics Election forensics is often associated with numbers: turnout, vote shares, invalid ballots, polling-station anomalies, unusual statistical patterns or inconsistencies between official databases and polling-station records. These are essential elements of electoral verification. However, election results are not produced…

Reading Time: 5 minutesUvod: zašto sentiment pripada izbornoj forenzici Kada se govori o izbornoj forenzici, najčešće se misli na analizu rezultata: izlaznost, glasove po biračkim mestima, nevažeće listiće, neobične obrasce u distribuciji glasova ili neslaganja između zapisnika i objavljenih podataka. To je važan, ali samo jedan deo slike….