A new photograph from election night last month has been released - the first showing Barack Obama accepting Mitt Romney's concession. The photo, ...

You'd think after the election last week there would be a bit of a lull in proceedings this week, especially in the States. Oh, hell no.

They may not have received the blanket coverage of the US election, but the presidential election in Ecuador is in full swing. And it's weird. A bu...

This is a growing problem for all centre-right parties throughout the democratic world. People like the benefits of a larger state but don't want to have to pay for it (leading to moments like the now legendary 'Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare' Tea Party placard). You don't need to be an economic genius to understand that if you spend more while making less, you're going to run into debt problems eventually. And it's a problem the Republicans better come up with better answers to in 2016 if they want the White House back.

The idea that this is a genuine exercise in localism just simply isn't credible, because the coalition is only interested in devolving power to two sectors: the private and the voluntary. If you want to know what Cameron and Osborne really think of local government, go and count the number of empty offices at council buildings across the land.

Despite the conciliatory talk of several elite Republicans, don't expect the GOP to suddenly go soft on immigration.

Your smart money might have predicted that Obama should be nowhere near likely to secure a second term in office. (Unless, of course, the local turf accountants had realised that when Reagan was re-elected it was - as with Obama today - during a sustained period of rising employment). And yet, over the past three years, election after election across the developed world has seen incumbent premiers voted out of office in the wake of the global economic crisis. The fact that Obama has bucked this trend is testament to his - and the team behind him's - ability to persuade the electorate of his economic credentials.

On the US election night, there were a host of unprecedented referendums that included three states proposing full-blown reform and regulation of their marijuana laws, in essence, and to use the shorthand, marijuana would be legalised. Those who follow drug policy held their collective breath (if they were awake to see it) as the results poured in from Washington, Oregon and Colorado.

What a gay election in the US this week! The election was historical and important in many ways, but one of the biggest was in regard to rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Republican and Tea Party pundits have talked about the potential for these burgeoning groups to change their voting preferences over time. But the GOP clearly risks long-term demographic suicide if its leaders continue their love-hate relationship with the centre without finding more imaginative ways to meet these voters halfway.

Although the president came out on top last night, the mountain in front of him remains as high and the path to the summit as steep as it was just a few days ago.

America's a big country, and so it was that sometimes locals had to get creative in order to vote on Tuesday. In most cases, Americans could amble...

Barack Obama secured re-election by maintaining the coalition that gave him victory four years ago: black and Hispanic voters, young Americans, women and Americans with post-graduate degrees. These outnumbered Mitt Romney’s supporters among white men, older Americans and people who have not been to college. This emerges clearly from analysis of YouGov’s major survey of 36,000 Americans during the final week of the campaign. This showed Obama leading Romney by 51-49% among Americans who supported one or other of the two men. It will take some days, and possibly weeks, for the count to be completed; however, it looks as if the final tally will produce figures within 0.5% of these.

President Obama's re-election win wasn't an affirmation of his less than glorious first-term, but more a dislike of the alternative in a nation where choices in elected officials have become fewer and largely dependent on big money.

There have been rumours, and they are just rumours at the moment, that Ann Romney will be dressed as a Welsh cake on Election Night. She'll be there, telling the world how her grandparents showed her how to make Welsh cakes, and how she wants to continue the tradition to her children and so on and so forth