The Future of Democracy Fan

I've enjoyed our month together, I really have. This blog started as a project to keep me from the jaws of leisure, and in that it's succeeded admirably: it's only since I let it slide, this week, that I've become bored of games and started getting angry about racist Facebook status updates- both issues that are, to put it as charitably as possible, first-world problems.

The reason I've been letting it slide is that I have, in fact, secured new employment. As is often the case, this is going to seriously cut down on the time I can spend reading internet expat papers from Izmir or Faro. On the other hand, it doesn't mean that I'm shutting down the blog, for these reasons:

1. Long commute. There are only so many puzzles I can do, and I may as well retrospectively justify the purchase of my netbook.
2. The blog came up in my job interview, and seemed to count in my credit. Why? Because the company has a stake in Turkey, and they seemed to be impressed when I was able to join in with talk of EU harmonisation and crazy projects.
3. That international portfolio means I might be spending some weekends in Bulgaria, Kenya or China (or at least looking at spreadsheets from there). It seems stupid not to read about the travails of their prime minister if I'm going to see the newspaper headlines in person.

There are likely to be changes. For one, I'm not going to have two-and-a-half-thousand words with pictures and supporting links each week. The pace is more likely to come down to one long post, or more likely two short ones, per week. I am going to try to keep up with at least something on the main blog every week.

Secondly, if I do end up downloading data from Mazovia or Bahia, I'll probably write about it even if they don't have an election coming up. That is, the focus might shift slightly from cup finals to league games. I will still try to crack open and peek inside any races that make the news, but with only a handfull of posts a month I'm not going to spend time on the procedural argy-bargy (unless it's super-ridiculous, of course).

Tomorrow is my first day in the office, so I might not get much done right away; rest assured, though, that I've stocked my netbook with reading for the train, and my iPod with the jazz music of King Rama IX.

The principle of Democracy Fan

Most people I know are football fans. I don't really care about football; I'm not interested in making predictions and agonising when my team loses. It can be frustrating when you're the only one in the office who likes your particular sport. Just ask any cricket fan who's had to explain the distinction between a tie and a draw to explain why he's red-eyed and hoarse.

Me? I like democracy. I didn't really get into it before 2008, but back then it was easy. For every person keen to talk about whether Wilkinson would be fit in time for the away leg, there was someone willing to discuss the electoral college, or superdelegates, or the Bradley affect (mythical, as it turned out). Our own election revived that for a while, but generally people look glazed when I talk about Single Transferable Vote or Oscar Arias' Nobel prize.


The other thing I like, as anyone unfortunate enough to have met me a party will know, is expounding. What I want to do with this blog, basically, is expound to you, and use that expounding as an excuse to indulge in my deep-seated desire to read the whole of wikipedia.


There's an election somewhere in the world every few weeks, and some of them have nuggets of pure gold in them. Did you know that the last Hungarian election was won by the last party to self-destruct, leaving the public so disenchanted with the competition that there is effectively no opposition party anymore? Did you know that in 2008 Italy elected a man as Prime Minister who is best described as falling somewhere in a triangle described by the villains from Tom Clancy, Dan Brown and late-nineties Bond films?  Did you know that in 2010, Costa Rica elected it's first female president, and that she is named Laura Chinchilla?


Political theatre is, in my opinion, the best spectator sport there is. Allow me to be your sports-news-commentator.