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Breakdown of the Votes in the Case of the Former Prime Minister of Iceland

April 25, 2012 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

The former Prime Minister of Iceland, Geir H. Haarde, was on trial for numerous accounts, related to the banking collapse of 2008. The Parliament had indicted him on 6 counts. Two of those were dismissed by the Court of Impeachment. He was acquitted on further three. At the end of the day he was found guilty of “not holding Cabinet meetings on important State matters”.

The justices on the Court of Impeachment were unanimous in their decisions to acquit the former PM for three of the charges. The vote on the fourth went 9-6. Here’s a brief breakdown of the votes on that one.

Votes in the Court of Impeachment on whether fmr. PM Geir H. Haarde was guilty of "not holding ministerial meetings on important State matters".

Here’s the breakdown in some more detail.

The Court of Impeachment consists of 8 judges chosen by the Parliament, 5 longest-serving Supreme Court judges, 1 Proffessor of Constitutional Law from the University of Iceland and The Chief Judge of Reykjavik District Court.

Parliament Appointed Judges

The Parliament chose the judges for the Court of Impeachment in 2005. The judges were chosen using proportional list representation. There were two lists: List A was the list of judges nominated by right-wing government at the time, List B were the judges nominated by (then) left-wing opposition. Here is those list of judges, that ended up sitting in the court, along with their list affiliation and verdict.

Judge	List	Verdict
Linda Rós Michaelsdóttir	A	Not Guilty
Sigrún Magnúsdóttir	A	Not Guilty
Fannar Jónasson	A	Not Guilty
Ástríður Grímsdóttir	A	Not Guilty
Vilhjálmur H. Vilhjálmsson	B	Guilty
Hlöðver Kjartansson	B	Guilty
Brynhildur Flóvenz	B	Guilty
Magnús Reynir Guðmundsson	B	Guilty

Thus, the pattern here seems pretty clear. Those nominated by the left (or current government) voted to convict, those nominated by the the current opposition voted “not guilty.

The full list of judges nominated by the Parliament as well as the stand-ins can be found under the following link: http://www.althingi.is/altext/131/f134.sgml

Supreme Court Judges

Supreme Court judges are nominated by the Minister of the Interior (formerly Minister of Justice). Here’s the list of the 5 Supreme Court justices, the political background of the minister nominating them and their verdict:

Judge	Nominating Minister	Verdict
Markús Sigurbjörnsson	Right	Guilty
Garðar Gíslason	Right	Not Guilty
Ingibjörg Benediktsdóttir	Right	Guilty
Viðar Már Matthíasson	Left	Guilty
Eiríkur Tómasson	Left	Guilty

The Justice Ministers in the years 1991-2009 were all members of the right-wing Indpendence party. A left-wing government took power in 2009. Note that this necessarily indicates the political background of the justices themselves, just the ministers (or governments) nomitating them. It should also be mentioned that there, where more senior judges on the Supreme Court, who apparently did not take their seats in the Court of Impeachment, probably due to their connection to the defendant.

Other Judges

Finally there are two more judges, one from the university of Iceland, and the Chief Judge Reykjavik District Court. (Both where in fact Stand-ins as the the professor of Constitutional Law, Björg Thorarensen opted out, and the Chief Judge of Reykjavik District Court was on a leave.)

Judge	Institution	Verdict
Benedikt Bogason	University of Iceland	Not Guilty
Eggert Óskarsson	District Court of Reykjavik	Guilty

Benedikt Bogarson has been a District Court Judge, (nominated by a right-wing minister) and was recently appointed to the Supreme Court by a left-wing minister. Eggert Óskarsson was nominated to the Reykjavik District Court by right wing minister but had been serving as a Reykjavik City Judge for some time before that. (Similar comments apply to some of the Supreme Court Judges in the paragraph before, there “political connection” is not always 100% clear. Or at least not to me.)

You can find the full verdict (in Icelandic) here:
http://www.xn--landsdmur-b7a.is/domar-og-urskurdir/nr/77

Category: Politics /

Voting Patterns in UN General Assembly

February 16, 2012 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

Voting Blocks in the UN General Assembly 2000-2008. CC-BY-SA 3.0 PaBaMapa.com.

The UN’s General Assembly is body where each UN nation gets one vote. Looking at these votes through the years 2000-2008, we check how often given to countries agree/disagree on a particular issue. The above picture is a so call “spring graph”, where country that vote similarily are shown close to one another, and those who disagree a lot are show far apart.

The colors represent the five regional groups of the UN. You can clearly see some things: The division between the developed/western world and the rest, as well as the relative isolation of USA and Israel in voting in the General Assembly.

Here is an applet where you can draw the countries in question around. If you click on one country and move the mouse over another one you can see their correlation.

Click here to open the applet in a new window.

Sources

The data of all UN GA votes -2008 can be found here:

Erik Voeten and Adis Merdzanovic, “United Nations General Assembly Voting Data”, hdl:1902.1/12379 UNF:3:Hpf6qOkDdzzvXF9m66yLTg== V1 [Version]

The physics part of the applet was taken and modified from the following example: http://www.openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=10349 by Joris Dormans.

Category: Applet, Politics /

Who votes like Iceland in the UN General Assembly?

February 14, 2012 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

It’s always fun to look the data from the votes of the UN General Assembly. Here we looked at the votes in the years 2000-2008 to see which countries agreed with Iceland the most. It turns out that the Nordic Countries, the Benelux, the Baltic States and Central European Countries are Iceland’s closest allies, in terms of votes. Iceland disagrees the most with the United States and Israel. (But then again, who doesn’t.)

1 Denmark 99.0%
2 Norway 98.9%
3 Netherlands 98.7%
4 Luxembourg 98.6%
5 Belgium 98.4%
6 Poland 98.4%
7 Czech Republic 98.2%
8 Lithuania 98.2%
9 Slovakia 98.2%
10 Slovenia 98.2%
11 Finland 98.1%
12 German Federal Republic 98.1%
13 Greece 98.1%
14 Bulgaria 98.1%
15 Hungary 98.1%
16 Italy 97.8%
17 Romania 97.6%
18 Spain 97.6%
19 Portugal 97.5%
20 Estonia 97.4%
21 Liechtenstein 97.4%
22 Croatia 97.3%
23 Austria 97.1%
24 Latvia 96.9%
25 Macedonia 96.9%
26 Montenegro 96.9%
27 Andorra 96.8%
28 Sweden 96.3%
29 San Marino 96.0%
30 Ireland 95.7%
31 Monaco 95.1%
32 Yugoslavia 94.5%
33 Cyprus 94.5%
34 Moldova 94.4%
35 Malta 93.9%
36 Georgia 93.3%
37 Switzerland 93.2%
38 New Zealand 92.7%
39 Japan 92.7%
40 Canada 91.6%
41 South Korea 91.5%
42 France 91.5%
43 Bosnia and Herzegovina 91.1%
44 Ukraine 90.8%
45 Albania 90.3%
46 United Kingdom 90.3%
47 Turkey 90.0%
48 Australia 86.7%
49 Argentina 82.1%
50 Armenia 81.5%
51 Chile 78.7%
52 Samoa 78.7%
53 Peru 78.2%
54 Uruguay 77.8%
55 Kazakhstan 77.7%
56 Guatemala 77.4%
57 Paraguay 76.9%
58 Russia 76.9%
59 Brazil 76.7%
60 Panama 75.8%
61 Mexico 75.3%
62 Costa Rica 74.9%
63 Honduras 74.3%
64 Dominican Republic 74.2%
65 Thailand 74.1%
66 Mongolia 74.1%
67 Solomon Islands 74.0%
68 Azerbaijan 73.9%
69 Bolivia 73.8%
70 Singapore 73.8%
71 El Salvador 73.8%
72 Ecuador 73.6%
73 Bahamas 73.5%
74 Fiji 73.5%
75 South Africa 73.3%
76 Nicaragua 73.2%
77 Philippines 72.7%
78 Colombia 72.6%
79 East Timor 72.5%
80 Belarus 72.5%
81 Belize 72.5%
82 Ghana 72.4%
83 Jamaica 72.0%
84 Barbados 71.9%
85 Tanzania 71.9%
86 Zambia 71.9%
87 Guyana 71.7%
88 Kyrgyzstan 71.7%
89 Eritrea 71.7%
90 Maldives 71.7%
91 Sri Lanka 71.7%
92 Mauritius 71.6%
93 Papua New Guinea 71.6%
94 Burkina Faso 71.3%
95 Cape Verde 71.3%
96 Namibia 71.3%
97 Burundi 71.2%
98 Cambodia 71.2%
99 Haiti 71.2%
100 Nepal 71.2%
101 Nigeria 71.1%
102 Senegal 71.0%
103 Botswana 70.9%
104 Mali 70.8%
105 Mozambique 70.8%
106 Trinidad and Tobago 70.8%
107 Tonga 70.8%
108 Antigua & Barbuda 70.7%
109 Ethiopia 70.5%
110 Tajikistan 70.5%
111 Togo 70.5%
112 Brunei 70.4%
113 Guinea 70.2%
114 Kenya 70.2%
115 Tunisia 70.2%
116 Madagascar 70.2%
117 St. Vincent and the Grenadines 70.2%
118 Jordan 70.1%
119 Venezuela 70.1%
120 Afghanistan 69.9%
121 Bangladesh 69.9%
122 St. Lucia 69.9%
123 United Arab Emirates 69.9%
124 Djibouti 69.9%
125 Lesotho 69.7%
126 Algeria 69.6%
127 Angola 69.6%
128 Malaysia 69.6%
129 Yemen 69.6%
130 Benin 69.6%
131 Gabon 69.6%
132 Indonesia 69.6%
133 Kuwait 69.6%
134 Morocco 69.4%
135 Bahrain 69.3%
136 Congo 69.2%
137 Qatar 69.1%
138 Mauritania 69.0%
139 China 69.0%
140 Lebanon 69.0%
141 Oman 69.0%
142 Zimbabwe 68.7%
143 Ivory Coast 68.6%
144 Grenada 68.5%
145 Saudi Arabia 68.4%
146 Suriname 68.4%
147 Swaziland 68.1%
148 Sudan 68.0%
149 Niger 67.9%
150 Uzbekistan 67.9%
151 Laos 67.8%
152 Malawi 67.5%
153 Myanmar 67.3%
154 Pakistan 67.3%
155 Vanuatu 67.2%
156 Guinea-Bissau 67.1%
157 Comoros 67.0%
158 Egypt 67.0%
159 Federated States of Micronesia 67.0%
160 Libya 67.0%
161 Seychelles 66.9%
162 Cuba 66.8%
163 Vietnam 66.6%
164 Uganda 66.4%
165 Central African Republic 66.4%
166 Bhutan 66.2%
167 Turkmenistan 66.1%
168 Dominica 66.0%
169 Iran 66.0%
170 Syria 66.0%
171 Iraq 65.9%
172 Sierra Leone 65.8%
173 Tuvalu 65.7%
174 Sao Tome and Principe 65.5%
175 Equatorial Guinea 65.3%
176 Cameroon 65.2%
177 India 65.1%
178 Liberia 64.9%
179 Nauru 64.7%
180 Chad 63.1%
181 Marshall Islands 62.9%
182 Palau 62.8%
183 Rwanda 62.7%
184 Somalia 62.4%
185 North Korea 62.2%
186 Gambia 62.1%
187 Democratic Republic of the Congo 61.8%
188 St. Kitts and Nevis 61.4%
189 Kiribati 60.9%
190 Israel 55.2%
191 United States of America 46.3%

This is taken from the following source: [Erik Voeten and Adis Merdzanovic, "United Nations General Assembly Voting Data", http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/12379 UNF:3:Hpf6qOkDdzzvXF9m66yLTg== V1 [Version] ]

If you are interested in the full pivot table showing the correlation between all UN member states, check back in a couple of days.

Category: Other, Politics /

Track Record of ESA in the EFTA Court

December 16, 2011 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

In yesterday‘s post we talked about the track record of the Efta Surveillance Authority against the Republic of Iceland in the EFTA Court. Here‘s a short comparison of how the other EFTA governments are doing using the same comparison.

Track Record of ESA Against Particular States int the EFTA Court

One note must be made. Court cases are not resolved with respect to statistics from other cases, they are resolved based on merits of the particular case. The EFTA Surveillance Authority would not be doing its job if the majority of its cases against the EFTA states would be thrown out. These statistics do of course provide some indications that the Icelandic government should be mild in its optimism, when it comes down to the upcoming IceSave court case. But this does of course not mean that the case is decided already. Even though many procecutors have decent conviction rates, it does not mean that someone who has just been accused of a crime is definitely guilty.

Here‘s a breakdown of the Norwegian and Liechtensteinian cases before the EFTA Court:

Norway:

Liechtenstein

Note that these are only the cases between ESA and the particular member states. ESA itself has been brought to the EFTA Court a couple of times by third parties. Those cases are not listed here.

Category: Politics /

EU – Fiscal Union – Who’s In and Who’s Out?

December 12, 2011 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

EU Fiscal Union as proposed in December 2011. PaBaMapa CC-BY-SA 3.0.Base map by maix¿? CC-BY-SA-2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

The recent EU-summit produced some news, whether it produced results is not yet clear. The leading pair France and Germany were pushing for a fiscal Union of the EU. In the end, they got something similar to that. See this article by the EUObserver for some brief insight: (What did the EU agree at its ‘make-or-break’ summit?)

The current 17 Euro Area members all seem to have agreed to the new rules. Although the fiscal union is considered to be primarily needed due to the common currency, some of the countries outside the Euro area, in particular Poland and other young members in fact pushed for being included as well, fearing that they might otherwise be left out in EU’s “second division”.

Thus, the non-euro EU-members, nine in total, may take part as well. Three of those, Czech Republic, Sweden and Hungary specifically stated that their ratification is subject to the approval of their national parliaments. Their are at least two more Poland and Denmark where this ratification might prove problematic if it needs to be done using the tougher constitutional methods (2/3 or 5/6 majorities).

The United Kingdom opted to stay out of the treaty, entirely. Some have considered this to be on of the first steps for UK leaving the EU. Time will tell if that’s the case. The Britons have not been to eager to take part in new EU-undertakings in the past decade, they are already opting out of the Euro, the Schengen treaty as well as the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Category: Maps, Politics /

Voting Patterns in the Constitutional Council of Iceland 2011

December 6, 2011 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

Voting Patterns in Icelandic Constitutional Council of Iceland. Those close to one another in views appear close on the map.

The above pictures was made by combining the voting results within the Icelandic Constitutional Council in 2011. Those representatives who voted in similar ways are shown close to one another. Connections symbolize that the representatives in question voted similarly more than 70% of the time. The darker the lines, the larger the conformity.

DISCLAIMER: I, the author of this blog, Pawel Bartoszek, was a member of the Constitutional Council of Iceland. This does kind of disqualify me as an “impartial observer” . Keep that in mind.

How the picture was made

I took data from all the voting in the last days of the Council (the 17th and the 18th meeting). This is official data, the file I assembled from different documents can be downloaded here: allvotes.

First, I ignored all unanimous votes. Then I calculated how much each two representatives agreed on average,

0 meaning full agreement in a particular vote
1 meaning that one abstained and the other voted yes/no and
2 meaning that one voted “yes” where the other voted “no”.

This is how I calculated the “distance” between each two representatives, and this was used to draw a so called Spring Graph (The bulk of the code came from this example by Joris Dormans). So, representatives close to one another in views appear close on the graph.

Thus, we get the following applet: (You can drag the circles around. SPACE resets the applet).

In fact the person with whom most representatives agreed was Ástrós Gunnlaugsdóttir. This is (probably) due to the fact that she only took part in the second reading of the proposals (due to maternity leave), where the voting was much more uniform, since most of the “hottest” topics had been agreed upon. If we only take into account the votes during the 1st reading of the final proposals, then the patterns are a bit more clear.

[You can drag the nodes around, and reset by pressing SPACEBAR]

The Constitutional Council was rather special, since the representatives did not run on party labels and did not, at least not formally, organize themselves in party-groups. As one can see though, there were some divisions. The cluster seen on the right in the top picture, consisted mostly of the Board (Chairman and Vice-Chairman of the Council and Chairmen and Vice-Chairmen of the committees), perhaps this being the more “conservative” side, whereas the other visible cluster consisted of more “radical” members of the Council. But, as said before, that judgment should maybe be passed by someone other than myself.

Category: Applet, Politics /

The Constant Fall of the Icelandic Krona

November 2, 2011 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

There has been an interesting discussion in Iceland in the past days about our National Currency, the Icelandic Krona. This has to do with a recent claim, e.g. by the Nobel prize winner Krugman, that the post-crunch super-devaluation of the krona has in fact helped us keeping the unemployment levels lower than in countries like Ireland.

Of course this comes at a price. The Krona has essentially been “protected” by different types of currency restrictions for most of its lifespan. This is not exactly a healthy environment for businesses to flourish. As this fine article by Þórlindur Kjartansson (in Icelandic) points out, the Krona has lost 99.95% of its value with respect to the Danish Krona since the two separated. Keeping Danish cash in your drawer amounts to 11% interest rate a year in Icelandic Kroner.

Here’s a short history of the Icelandic Krona for the past 30 years.

The Icelandic Krona agains the Danish Krona. 1980-2011. PaBaMapa: CC-BY-SA.

The data comes from the Central Bank of Iceland. See: http://www.sedlabanki.is/?PageID=37

Now here’s a small applet showing the collapse of the Krona through the years:

[Click on the applet window to reset the graphics.]

Category: Animations, Politics /

The Voter-Turnout in the Polish Parliamentary Elections of 2011

October 18, 2011 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

This is short video showing how (frequently) the voters in the Polish elections of 2011 voted. The darker the area, the more people voted.

This is based on data from the Polish Electoral Commission. You can see that the people in the cities generally vote more than folks from the countryside. Also, looking at the time-series throughout the day you can tell that the traditionally conservative south-east voted rather early whereas the city dwellers took more time.

The colors are relative in each frame, which explains the lightening of some areas as the day passes by. The maps where taken from the official electoral site pkw.gov.pl (with permission, although I’m not sure I needed one). The video was mostly done using GIMP.

Category: Animations, Politics / Tags: elections, Poland, politics

Polish Senate Elections of 2011

October 12, 2011 / Pawel Bartoszek / No comments

The Poles went to the polls on October the 9th 2011 and elected a new Parliament. There were new rules in play for the Senate elections, the one hundred (100) senators where for the first time elected in a Firs Past the Post single member constituencies. This is the electoral map.

An Electoral Map of the Polish Senate Elections, October 2011.

As you can see, the ruling right-wing liberal Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) took the bulk of the senate seats, in fact they took 63 of them. They were, as before, strong in Western parts of the country as well as the bigger cities. The traditionalist christian conservative party Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) fared better in the East as well as in the rural areas, grabbing a total of 31 seats. The co-ruling agrarian Polish People’s Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe) got two seats, with the remaining four seats going to independent candidates.

The final table thus looks as follows:

PO – 63
PIS – 31
PSL – 2
OTHER 4

This is of course a good victory for the ruling coalition, which should be able two count on at least 65 of its own members, as well as at least 3 of the 4 “independents”, which were elected with at least informal support of PO (Cimoszewicz, Borowski and Kutz did not receive any competition from PO in the districts where they ran).

A big question remains, with regards to the whole sense of the Senate idea. The electoral reform where supposed to give local politicians, even independents a stronger chance at a seat in the Polish Senate. Looking at the map one can see that local persona had little effect on the outcome, the voters almost uniformly, voted for their national parties, and not for particular candidates.

The map outline above is taken from the webpage of the Polish Electoral Committee. (www.pkw.gov.pl)

Category: Maps, Politics / Tags: 2011, electoral map, map, Poland, Senate Elections