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.     

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.     

The British general election of 2010 under different voting rules

The 2010 British election resulted in what the British refer to as a “hung Parliament” for the first time in over a generation. This result further heightened the debate over the fairness and utility of the nation’s centuries-old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. Survey data are used to simulate the election outcome under four different electoral systems beyond FPTP: round-robin pair-wise comparisons, the Borda count, the alternative vote, and Coombs' method. Results suggest that in 2010, the Liberal-Democrats were Condorcet preferred to all other parties and would have won a national election under every tested method except the alternative vote, the method supported by the Liberal-Democrats during the referendum in May 2011 and, of course, FPTP as actually used.     

Forecasting the 2015 British general election: The Seats-Votes model

This paper applies the Seats-Votes Model to the task of forecasting the outcome of the 2015 election in Britain in terms of the seats won by the three major parties. The model derives originally from the ‘Law of Cubic Proportions’ the first formal statistical election forecasting model to be developed in Britain. It is an aggregate model which utilises the seats won by the major parties in the previous general election together with vote intentions six months prior to the general election to forecast seats. The model was reasonably successful in forecasting the 2005 and 2010 general elections, but has to be modified to take into account the ‘regime shift’ which occurred when the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.     

The nuclear weapons issue in the 1983 British general election

Abstract. In common with many other Western European countries, the issue of nuclear weapons rose to political prominence in Britain in the course of the 1980s. However, whereas the issue was often taken up by newly formed environmentalist parties elsewhere, it differentiated the traditional parties one from the other in Britain. This was made possible by the Labour party's manifesto commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament. This article details the views of the British electorate on the nuclear issue and assesses its importance for individual voting patterns in the 1983 general election. The electorate shows itself able to distinguish between, and hold opposing views on, nuclear weapons in principle and control over them in practice. Its general support for them, however, means that Labour's perceived hostility to them cost it a considerable number of votes in net terms. These losses could have been mitigated, perhaps even turned into gains, had the party emphasised the security problems stemming from Britain's lack of control over American nuclear weapons on its soil.     

Choosing the least-worst government: The British general election of 2005

This article provides an overview of the British general election of 2005. It examines the major political issues that arose during the Blair government's second term in office and their impact on the governing Labour Party's electoral support. Despite voters' growing sense of weariness with Labour, the Conservative opposition failed to convince the electorate that it was a credible government-in-waiting. The result was that Labour was comfortably returned to office, though with a much-reduced majority. The Liberal Democrats profited from the unpopularity of the Iraq War, while minor parties won their highest ever tally of votes.     

British parties and spatial competition: Dimensions of party evaluation in the 1992 election

Scholars of British politics traditionally characterize the electorate in terms of partisanship and social class. This paper suggests that ideology and issue preferences also enter into voter perceptions of British political parties and leadership. Using data from the 1992 British Election Study, the paper analyzes the factors that contribute to individual voters; perceptions of the Conservative and Labour parties. The 1992 election saw the major parties move toward the ideological center of British voters. Perceptions of political parties are found to be multidimensional and issue-oriented. A spatial model incorporating issue preferences and perceptions of party positions proves both empirically and theoretically richer than simple models of partisanship. The analysis of British voters complements earlier applications of the general spatial model in the context of the United States.     

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.     

The Maltese general election of 1987

The Maltese general election of 9 May 1987 returned the Nationalist Party to power with a single-seat majority in Malta's unicameral legislature. The result, on a record 96.11 per cent poll, ended sixteen years of Malta Labour Party rule. In the 1981 elections the MLP had gained a majority of seats—34 to the PN's 31—despite polling a minority of votes in the islands' complex STV system. Constitutional changes passed by Parliament in January 1987 ruled out the possibility of such a ‘freak’ result being repeated, by guaranteeing the party polling a majority of votes a majority of seats through a ‘topping-up’ procedure. This change gave the Nationalists victory in 1987. Early stages of the lengthy campaign witnessed fairly serious political violence, and fears had been expressed that in May whoever lost might refuse peacefully to concede defeat. However, whilst polling day and. more particularly, the aftermath of the result were marked by some violent incidents, the transfer of power from Labour to the PN took place smoothly. Maltese democracy, often seen as fragile by outside observers, seemed to have passed this difficult test.