Monthly Archives: June 2009

Iranian elections, with SCIENCE

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Georg Hoffmann of PrimaKlima has turned away from climatology for a moment to carry out an interesting statistical analysis of the Iranian election results. Bizarrely, the percentage split between the incumbent and the closest rival remained entirely stable throughout the count – an R2 value of 0.999. But even more bizarrely, the lead for Ahmadinejad doesn’t correlate with anything – as if the uniform national swing beloved of psephologists was real, or for that matter, as if someone had simply shifted the numbers across the board. For comparison, he ran the same exercise for the 2005 German elections, which shows a wide scatter of points with a concentration of big CDU leads in the south.

Then, however, comes the genuinely scientific bit. What would Benford’s law, the principle that in most data sets there is a large excess of numbers that begin with low digits, and that therefore fake data can be identified by its divergence from this, make of it? (The data, by the way, is available here.) Well…it turns out that the results pass the Benford test, which may mean that they are honest or possibly that the Iranian Ministry of the Interior reads blogs, too.

Why Ahmadinejad will win

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We’ve seen a number of regimes fall because of popular protests: Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, yadda yadda. We’ve also seen several that have not fallen: Burma, Armenia, Greece. Which one does Iran more resemble? Or, to put it another way, what are the common factors?

Here’s a first attempt at classification. Political scientists and (especially) people who know more about Iran are encouraged to chime in.

Factors that make a regime vulnerable

In ascending order:

1) The regime is widely hated. Surprisingly, this seems not to be a highly correlated variable. Some of the survivor regimes were almost universally loathed by their people (Burma) while some governments that still enjoyed some popular support managed to collapse anyway (Ukraine).

Relevance to Iran: Low. Many people dislike the current government, but not many actually hate it.
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Not Exactly a United Opposition

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The Georgian opposition is generally described as a loose alliance, united mainly in their distaste for current president Mikhail Saakashvili and their somewhat greater distaste for Russian domination. In the latter they are in harmony with the vast majority of Georgians, while the former is not so clear. But they are divided on many more fronts, one reason why they, collectively, do not appear quite ready for prime time.

Here’s one theme, what role foreign embassies to Georgia should play in the confrontation between the opposition and the ruling party:

Nino Burjanadze, leader of Democratic Movement-United Georgia party, called on foreign diplomats accredited in Tbilisi to react and condemn “illegal actions” taken by the authorities… (Civil.ge, May 21)

Levan Gachechiladze, an opposition politician, called on the western diplomats to give up “indifferent stance” and make “concrete statements” about the crisis in Georgia, instead of only repeating “one word – ‘dialogue’.” (Civil.ge, May 29)

…Opposition leaders said foreign diplomats should not involve themselves in internal politics.

“This is considered as interference in domestic political processes, which they are not entitled to do,” said Salome Zurabishvili, Georgia’s former foreign minister and the leader of the Georgia’s Way Party, according to the Interfax news agency. (New York Times, June 15)

Maybe this is why Napoleon preferred to be opposed by coalitions?

Meanwhile in New York and Georgia

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The Russian judge was unimpressed by both the technical merits and the artistic program of the UN resolution to extend the observation mission in Georgia’s breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 0.0 all around, or Géorgie, nul point.

Since 1993, UN observers had worked both sides of the lines to keep tabs on troop movements and other aspects of security in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With local tendencies toward explosions and pot-shots (see here, here, and the end of the page here), precisely the kinds of things that preceded last summer’s war, monitoring by a reasonably neutral group gives cooler heads a chance to prevail. Their current mandate expired last night at midnight, and the resolution would have kept this function going. The Security Council vote was 10 in favor, four abstaining (including China) and Russia exercising its veto.

“We need to get rid of this apparition [of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of Georgia],” Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the council after casting the veto. “Our partners, however, prefer poison to medicine.”

Apparently that’s diplomatic language in Putin’s Medvedev’s Russia.

[Churkin] had offered to extend the mission’s mandate for one month on condition that the Security Council agree to delete all the “offensive references” in the resolution to names and sovereignty

Because Abkhazia and South Ossetia are regarded as independent by Russia and the overwhelming majority of the international community that consists of Nicaragua.

Russia has also forced the end of the OSCE observation mission in Georgia.

The only governmental monitors left are those from the European Union. EU monitors, however, do not have a mandate that gives them access across the administrative boundaries. They can peer into Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but cannot go and see for themselves.

One fewer support for stability. It’s almost as if one major player isn’t interested in stability.

From Yerevan to Tehran?

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Via The Monkey Cage, an interesting article on the lessons hardline regimes may have learned from the Orange Revolution. Here are his four lessons:

1) If you are going to fix the results of an election, give yourself a big margin of victory. Otherwise, a little electoral fraud can credibly be argued to have swung the outcome of the election (as was the case in the Serbian and Ukrainian presidential election)….

2) If you are really going to rig the results of elections, don’t mess around with pretenses of transparency that could end up leaving hard evidence of electoral fraud….

3) Don’t leave any doubt about the willingness of security forces to defend the regime. […]

4) Technology–especially social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, but also more basic technology such as text messaging–is a friend of opposition forces attempting to combat electoral fraud, so do what you can to minimize its impact.

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Everything In Germany Is Going Up….

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Everything in Germany is going up, except it seems the real economy – and except of course prices, which were stationary in May (that is a change of 0% year on year – the lowest inflation rate for over 20 years). Anyway, today it was the turn of investor confidence to put in another good reading. In fact German investor confidence rose to what is effectively a three-year high in June. Aparently investors feel the recession in Europe’s largest economy is bottoming out.

The ZEW Center for European Economic Research said its index of investor and analyst expectations increased to 44.8 from 31.1 in May – the highest reading since May 2006.

Unfortunately, there is little real evidence to support this highly optimistic view of the future. Continue reading →

E-Facing The Future

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Quietly clicking my way through Bloomberg last Sunday afternoon, I came across this:

Facebook Members Register Names at 550 a Second

Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking site, said members registered new user names at a rate of more than 550 a second after the company offered people the chance to claim a personalized Web address.

Facebook started accepted registrations at midnight New York time on a first-come, first-served basis. Within the first seven minutes, 345,000 people had claimed user names, said Larry Yu, a spokesman for Palo Alto, California-based Facebook. Within 15 minutes, 500,000 users had grabbed a name.

Mein Gott, I thought to myself, if 550 people a second are doing something, they can’t all be wrong. So I immediately signed up. Actually, this isn’t my first experience with social networking since I did try Orkut out some years back, but somehow I didn’t quite get the point. Either I was missing something, or Orkut was. Now I think I’ve finally got it. Perhaps the technology has improved, or perhaps I have. As I said in one of my first postings:

Ok. This is just what I’ve always wanted really. A quick’n dirty personal blog. Here we go. Boy am I going to enjoy this.

Daniel Dresner once broke bloggers down into two groups, the “thinkers” and the “linkers”. I probably would be immodest enough to suggest that most of my material falls into the first category (my postings are lo-o-o-ng, horribly long), but since I don’t fit any mould, and Iam hard to typecast, I also have that hidden “linker” part, struggling within and desperate to come out. Which is why Facebook is just great.

In addition, on blogs like this I can probably only manage to post something worthwhile perhaps once or twice a month, and there is news everyday.

So, if you want some of that up to the minute “breaking” stuff, and are willing to submit yourself to a good dose of link spam, why not come on in and subscribe to my new state-of-the-art blog? You can either send me a friend request via FB, or mail me direct (you can find the mail on my Roubini Global page). Let’s all go and take a long hard look at the future, you never know, it might just work.

Banking Problems In Europe Send The Whole World Running For Cover

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Well that so called investor “risk appetite” took a surprise hit yesterday (and from an unexpected quarter). It wasn’t the worries about US fiscal deficits that caused the panic, but problems in the European banking system. Gwen Robinson reports:

Risk appetite suffered a sharp deterioration on Monday as fresh uncertainty about the global economy prompted investors to shift from equities, commodities and emerging market assets into the perceived safety of government bonds and the dollar. Markets were further unnerved by warnings on the economic outlook from the head of the IMF and an ECB report saying eurozone banks face another $283bn in writedowns on bad loans and securities this year and next.

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Green Shoots, 2

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For a banned demonstration called off by the opposition candidate, this looks pretty big. New York Times says “hundreds of thousands,” i.e., more than came to see Obama in Berlin.

Government apparently continuing to try to crack down on media. Much information still coming out, but verification in the old media sense is difficult, and the situation evolving very quickly, as darkness has just fallen in Tehran.

NYT blog is forwarding reports of shooting in Azadi Square. If true, and if there is more, that would certainly change the game. Does the opposition have enough people power? How much force will the government use? Those are tonight’s questions.