Forecasting the 2010 general election using aggregate local election data

The paper presents a revised method for estimating national vote shares using aggregate data from local government by-elections. The model was originally developed to forecast the annual outcome of local elections but was adapted in time to provide an accurate forecast of Labour’s landslide victory at the 1997 general election. However, over the past decade the changing pattern of party competition which has seen parties becoming more selective about which elections to contest has led to more elections being excluded from the modelling because they failed to meet the exacting criteria that all three major parties, Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats, had contested both the by-election and the previous main election, normally held in May. Relaxing these criteria, although increasing the number of available cases would adversely affect the forecast, over- or under-estimating party votes. Instead, the revised method overcomes the problem of differential competition by estimating vote shares for parties that contest one but not both elections. A further innovation is the calculation of a weighted moving quarterly average which takes account of the number of days elapsed between the by-election date and the date of forecast. Using the new method we provide estimates for likely party shares for the 2010 general election.     

Aggregate level forecasting of the 2010 general election in Britain: The Seats-Votes model

The Seats-Votes model forecasts party seat shares in the House of Commons using data from general elections and opinion polls between 1945 and 2009. The model is built on a generalisation of the cube rule which provided a fairly accurate method of translating votes into seats when Britain was effectively a two party system prior to the 1970s. It combines past information on seat shares in the current Parliament with voting intention data six months prior to the general election to forecast seat shares. Applied to the task of forecasting the outcome of a general election in early May of 2010, it predicts a hung Parliament, with the Conservatives as the largest party. The relatively small sample used to estimate the model means that predictions about the size of the parties in Parliament are quite tentative, though predictions about the likelihood of a hung Parliament are more certain.     

Citizen forecasting: Can UK voters see the future?

The leading approaches to election forecasting have been statistical models, prediction markets, or vote intention polls. This paper explores a different, little used approach - citizen forecasting - a method never yet tried for the case of the United Kingdom. Citizen forecasting simply asks voters in a scientific pre-election survey who they think will win. This aggregated (averaged) result is then assessed for its accuracy in forecasting the overall election outcome. This assessment is carried out on UK general elections from 1951 to 2005, and then applied to 2010. We find, among other things, that generally speaking the majority of the electorate can foretell the winner in advance.     

Methodologies of election forecasting: Calling the 2010 UK “hung parliament”

Election forecasting has experienced considerable growth as a subfield within political science. Research work on United Kingdom elections has been cutting edge here. The recent 2010 general election afforded the opportunity for a trial of different forecasting methodologies. These efforts are showcased in this volume, and include standard, and not-so-standard, statistical models. Overall, these models perform well, foreseeing the unprecedented outcome of a “hung parliament”, as most pollsters and pundits did not. Moreover, they achieved this accuracy with forecasts well in advance of the election itself.     

The British Election Study 2015 general election constituency forecast

This paper develops a votes-to-seats nowcast model using individual level data from the British Election Study Internet panel to model the flow of the vote between 2010 and 2015. Transition matrices for each constituency are calculated using multinomial models of flows between 2010 origins and 2015 destinations. Respondents are reweighted to the polling average for England, Scotland and Wales and are further reweighted using predicted turnout to downweight respondents who are less likely to vote. The forecast performed poorly in 2015 because of polling errors and because the “Ashcroft” constituency vote intention question overestimated the Liberal Democrat incumbency effect. Without these errors, the forecast would have come much closer to the result but would still have underestimated the Conservatives' seats.     

Piecing it all together and forecasting who governs: The 2015 British general election

This paper discusses a new probabilistic forecasting method that was designed for the 2015 British general election. It proceeds in a series of steps from opinion poll averaging, forecasting national-level vote shares and uncertainty estimates, and subsequent simulation of hypothetical election results, through modelling of constituency polls and survey data to identify and adjust for patterns in the constituency-level variation in party performance, and finally to probabilistic forecasting of seat outcomes and of different combinations of parties commanding relevant governing majorities in parliament.     

Forecasting the 2015 British election through party popularity functions

To forecast the May 7, 2015 British General Election, we develop party popularity models based on Continuous Monitoring Survey (CMS) data from April 2004 to February 2015. Our models predict party vote shares three months prior to the election, using previous support levels, national economic evaluations, macro-partisanship and political measures. Our Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) methodology allows us to predict support for the Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats and “other” parties, separately, yet simultaneously, by constraining total support for all parties to 100%. Our model, estimated with data from February 2015, predicts that Labour will win the highest vote share in Great Britain, but that no party will win a majority of seats in parliament.     

“Wisdom of crowds”? A decentralised election forecasting model that uses citizens’ local expectations

Many studies report the “wonders of aggregation” and that groups (often) yield better decisions than individuals. Can this “wisdom of crowds”-effect be used to forecast elections? Forecasting models in first-past-the-post systems need to translate vote shares into seat shares by some formula; however, the seat–vote ratio alters from election to election. To circumvent this problem, this paper proposes citizen forecasting, which aggregates citizens’ local expectations to directly forecast constituencies. Using data from the 2010 British Election Study, this paper finds (1) that groups are better forecasters than individuals, (2) that citizen forecasting correctly predicts a hung parliament, and (3) that marginality and group size are important predictors for “getting it right”.     

A Mountain to Climb: The Labour Together 2019 Election Review

The Labour Together review of the 2019 election brings together polling data, survey data, interviews, and submissions from across the Labour movement. An unpopular leader, tensions around the Brexit position, and a manifesto which was not seen as credible, are all found to have contributed to the scale of the defeat, but Labour’s unexpectedly strong performance in 2017 also masked long-term issues in its connection with the electorate and within the party’s campaign organisation. The report attempts to move beyond simply diagnosing the difficulties the party faces, but some of the thorniest issues for the party to resolve are nonetheless left unresolved.     

The impact of election outcome on internal political efficacy: The role of contextual factors

Many studies have investigated the consequences of election outcome for one of the important public attitudes, political efficacy. The effect of election outcome on external efficacy has been confirmed by most previous studies, whereas the effect on internal efficacy is not clear-cut. By reconceptualizing internal efficacy based on the social cognitive theory of self-efficacy, this study argues that there are two conditions for an election outcome’s impact on internal efficacy: the expected difficulty of winning and the level of involvement in the election. By analyzing panel survey data collected for three Japanese Lower House elections, this study shows that election outcome exerted an impact on internal efficacy if the following two conditions were simultaneously satisfied: (1) winners/losers perceived that the election was difficult/easy to win, and (2) voters were deeply involved in the election process.     

From polls to votes to seats: Forecasting the 2015 British general election

This paper develops a three-stage method to forecast parliamentary election results from vote preferences in British opinion polls: (1) adjusting and aggregating vote-intentions from different polling organizations; (2) forecasting how public support for parties will change in the period before election day; and (3) translating, through simulations, the forecast of election day vote shares into seat totals while incorporating constituency-level information, including local vote-intention polls. Overall, this approach seeks to combine relevant national, regional and local information, and uncertainty about that information, to better reflect the fragmentation and diversity of political contexts found in the new era of five/six-party British politics.     

The effects of technical parties and partisan election management bodies on voting outcomes

Research on election integrity has noted the important role of election administration in facilitating free and fair practices. However, limited research has assessed how the staffing of polling station level election commissions may influence voting. Using extensive personnel and election data from Ukraine, this article investigates how partisanship and liberal registration rules permit major parties to “stack” election commissions with sympathetic officials. The empirical analysis demonstrates that the placement of representatives from major parties, or affiliated parties, in leadership positions on polling station commissions is associated with improved election outcomes.     

Yes, Prime Minister: The key to forecasting British elections

We use our “PM and Pendulum” Model to forecast the outcome of the 2010 General election. The vote function of the model, aside from a cyclical dynamic, relies on approval of the prime minister as the sole predictor. We find that PM Approval predicts the vote (and vote intention between elections) more accurately than does Government Approval. Turning to the forecasting of seats, we examine the accuracy of the autoregressive model of the vote-seat translation against the uniform-swing model, which is widely used by pollsters and the media. Testing the alternatives on election data since 1910, our autoregressive vote-seat translation model proves superior to the uniform-swing model.     

The British general election: Synthetic forecasts

Election forecasting work, in Britain and elsewhere, has been confined mainly to traditional approaches – statistical modeling or poll-watching. We import a new approach, which we call synthetic modeling. These models, developed out of forecasting efforts from the American 2012 presidential election, we are currently testing in a comparative European context. In this exercise, we apply the strategy to forecasting British general elections, in particular the upcoming 2015 contest. These synthetic forecasts come from hybrid models blending structural knowledge with contemporary public opinion. We generate ongoing nowcasts, from six months prior, to one month before, Election Day itself.     

Video election note: The UK General Election of 2010

This video election note is a very brief introduction to some of the main points of interest regarding the 2010 UK general election. It touches on events since the 2005 election, the course of the campaign, the salient issues, policy differences between the main parties, key features of the outcome for the major and minor parties, turnout, government formation and the implications for British politics. There are also preliminary observations on what the pattern of constituency results tell us about how the recession and the expenses crisis affected outcomes.     

Do local elections predict the outcome of the next general election? Forecasting British general elections from local election national vote share estimates

This article outlines a method for forecasting British general elections from national level vote shares at local elections. Although local elections are notionally ‘local’, the evidence suggests that they at least partly mirror national electoral fortunes. A simple general election vote share on local election vote share regression model that accounts for partisan differences and incumbency effects fits past data with reasonable accuracy. Based on the results of the 2013 and 2014 local elections, the model forecast a 56% probability of hung parliament, with a 78% probability of the Conservatives receiving the largest share of the vote.     

The United Kingdom 2017 election: polarisation in a split issue space

Abstract

After decades in which party competition was fought in the centre ground, the 2017 UK General Election witnessed a return to more conflictual politics. This article assesses public support for the electoral strategies of the main parties and examines the extent to which the issues the parties campaigned on resonated with their own supporters, as well as with the wider public. Drawing on the issue-yield framework, the article shows that the Conservative campaign – generally considered to be badly run – did not focus on issues that would fully exploit the opportunities for expanding support that were open to the party. Labour, by contrast, played a much better hand. While taking a clear left-wing stance on many policies that were popular with its constituency, the party also skilfully emphasised valence issues that Labour is often seen as more credible on, such as healthcare and education.     

The effects of election polls in Mexico's 2018 presidential campaign

This research note presents the results of an experimental design to study the effects of poll releases in Mexico's 2018 presidential campaign. Our research design allows us to test the conditions in which polling information can alter voters' reported preferences. The results show that the exposure to polling results makes respondents more likely to identify themselves as undecided. We interpret this change as a sign of voters' willingness to form veridical attitudes. To support this interpretation, we show that the effect is stronger among citizens with the ability and motivation to elaborate on the polling information. The findings contribute to the debate about the consequences of publishing pre-election poll results that show a clear advantage for one of the candidates.