Forecasting the 2015 general election using aggregate local election data

Local government election results are used to estimate a national equivalent vote that provides the basis for a general election forecast. By-elections provide the means for calculating weighted quarterly averages of national support. These show trends similar to those obtained by national polls. By-election results in the three month period leading to the general election contribute towards the national vote share calculation and seat distributions are determined by uniform national swing. Additionally, results from the main council elections from 2011 onwards are aggregated to the parliamentary constituency level and used to estimate each party's relative performance in key target seats. This information is used to fine-tune the final seat forecast which suggests a hung parliament is the most likely outcome.     

Bringing home the bacon: an empirical analysis of the extent and effects of pork-barreling in Australian politics

Which electorates receive targeted funding, and does targeted funding swing votes? To answer these questions, I analyze four discretionary programs funded by the Australian federal government during the 2001–2004 election cycle. Controlling for relevant demographic characteristics of the electorate, those electorates held by the governing coalition received a larger share of discretionary funding, and a larger number of program grants. Among government seats, funding does not appear to have been directed towards those that were more marginal. More discretionary funding—particularly on road-building—was associated with a larger swing towards the government in the 2004 election.     

Israel’s election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears most likely to form Israel’s next government following its election on 9 April, although it is unclear how stable such a government would be. Further elections within the next two years are quite possible. Whatever the outcome of the election, Israel’s next leader will be forced to address a range of serious and interrelated strategic challenges.     

The Geographical Challenge: How Winning Elections Has Become Much More Difficult for Labour

Labour won fewer seats in 2015 than in 2010, even though its share of the vote increased. The decline in representation was occasioned by three features of the electoral geography of the 2015 contest—a collapse in Labour support in Scotland, a particularly strong Conservative advance in marginal seats and the fact that in England and Wales Labour's vote rose most strongly in seats that the party already held. As a result, Labour's vote became markedly less efficiently distributed than that of the Conservatives—a development that could make it very difficult for the party to win an overall majority at the next election. Meanwhile, the redrawing of constituency boundaries that is currently in train will make winning a majority even more difficult. However, the next election could well produce a hung parliament, and the party should be prepared for that eventuality.     

New Labour,New Protest? How the Liberal Democrats Profited from Blair's Mistakes

Traditionally, the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have gained seats from Labour and have always seen their support fall during a Labour government. In 2005, and in by-elections from 2003, the party reversed that trend. Yet, apart from particular success amongst Muslims, the resulting change in the social geography of Liberal Democrat support was not accompanied by any major change in the social and ideological character of the individuals who voted for it. The Liberal Democrats remain very much a party whose fortunes rests on its ability to garner protest votes; they are now simply able to secure such support from previous Labour voters too, perhaps because of their perceived ideological proximity to Labour. If the party's support rests once again at the next election on support for centre-left principles, this raises difficult issues if the party appears to be willing to put the Conservatives into government.     

The 2019 General Election in Northern Ireland: the Rise of the Centre Ground?

The experience of the 2019 general election in Northern Ireland took a very different course to that of the rest of the UK and, indeed, to the pattern of electoral politics typical of the region. Coming after almost three years with no functioning devolved government, combined with intense disagreement and uncertainty about Brexit, voters were ready to give a message to the two largest parties. Both Sinn Féin and the DUP suffered losses in the election, with the headline outcome being that unionism no longer holds the majority of seats for Northern Ireland in Westminster. More generally, there was a swing from both sides towards centre ground voting, which brought significant gains for the Alliance Party and the SDLP. This article summarises the reasons for this broad trend, focussing on the conditions and electoral pacts which brought it about. It also considers what it might mean for the prospects for Irish unification, noting that a referendum on unification will only be passed by attracting votes from those who tend to see themselves as neither unionist or nationalist.     

Estimating the potential impact of nonvoters on outcomes of parliamentary elections in proportional systems with an application to German national elections from 1949 to 2009

“If turnout was 100%, would it affect the election result?” is a frequently asked research question. So far, the question has been primarily answered regarding the changes in the distribution of votes. This article extends the analysis to changes in the distribution of seats and government formation. It therefore proposes a method that factors in apportionment methods, election threshold, sizes of parliaments, leverage of nonvoters, closeness of election results, and individual characteristics of nonvoters. The method is then applied to German national elections from 1949 to 2009. The application shows that Germany's Social Democratic Party (SPD) would have gained from the counterfactual participation of nonvoters, although usually not enough to result in a government change. However, the elections of 1994 and 2005 show evidence that such a change could have happened.     

Impact of National Politics on Local Elections in Scandinavia

The impact of national politics on local county and municipal elections since about 1970 is studied at the aggregate national level in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. At this level, the local politics swing, i.e., the change in party support from one local election to the next, can to a high degree be predicted by the swing in national politics support. In Sweden, the national politics support is simply the party support at the national election held on the same day as the local elections, while opinion polls are used for Denmark and Norway. With the swing model for proportional impact from national to local politics, it appears that the national impact is stronger in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. The swing model can be improved by including feedback from the difference between local politics and national politics support at the previous election. The feedback force from national to local politics estimated by the feedback model is also stronger in Norway and Sweden than in Denmark. Further, a preliminary analysis of Danish data indicates that the feedback model is especially relevant for analysis of data from the individual municipalities.     

A tale of firsts: the 2019 Austrian snap election

Abstract

The 2019 Austrian snap election, held on 29 September 2019, was preceded by a series of scandals. Most prominent among them was the so-called ‘Ibizagate’ involving the former Vice-Chancellor and FPÖ party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache. The scandal eventually led to the collapse of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition in May 2019 and the formation of a caretaker government. The election day in September brought a clear victory for the ÖVP with an increase of almost six percentage points, compared to its vote share in the 2017 election. The second big winner was the Green party which scored the best result in the party history with 13.9 per cent of the vote. Amid scandals, the FPÖ saw its support fall to only 16.2 per cent; the election also resulted in an all-time low for the SPÖ achieving only 21.2 per cent. The article presents the background, the election campaign and the results of the 2019 Austrian election, discussing the wide range of ‘firsts’ that characterized them, including the formation of the first ÖVP-Green coalition government in Austria.     

The 1979 Local Elections in Norway

The result of the 1979 local elections in Norway showed that a strong Conservative wind was blowing over the country. The Conservative Party (Høyre) made an average progress of 8.5 per cent, compared with the previous local election results in 1975. The big loser was the Centre Party, which suffered a decrease of 2.8 per cent as an unweighted average. The governing party of Norway, the Labour Party, experienced only minor changes compared with the 1975 results, but compared with the last Storting election in 1977, the party's vote dropped from 42.2 to 36.1 per cent. Besides the Conservatives, gains were registered by the Liberal Party (Venstre) and the right-wing Progress Party (Fremskrittspariet, formerly Anders Langes Parti). A local election in Norway has traditionally seen a good many local non-partisan election lists. In this election, however, such lists won only 2.3 per cent of the vote, thus confirming a decline in their strength and a process of politicization that have been observed during all elections in the 1970s.     

Government Formation in the Nordic Countries: The Electoral Connection

Government formation is guided by several principles, such as majority, plurality and electoral principles. According to the electoral principle, parties that increase their share of seats in the elections should form the government, parties that lose seats joining the opposition. We analyse the fulfilment of this principle in the five Nordic countries. In Denmark, Finland and Iceland the majority of governments contained parties that both won and lost in elections, whereas in Sweden nearly half of the governments included only parties that lost seats. Only in Iceland and Denmark does election success translate to an increased probability of a government place in an increasing way. In Norway and particularly in Sweden big losers have better chances of being in government than big winners. Party system attributes are not related to the fulfilment of the electoral principle. To shift our analysis to individual parties, prime ministers come more likely from parties that are big winners. Winning does not explain the probability of becoming a coalition partner. If a party wants to be in government it is more important to avoid losing seats than to be an actual winner. Coalition partners are more likely to be mid–sized parties, a finding probably explained by the desire of the formateur party to maximise its policy influence in the government.     

No Friends in the North? The Conservative Party in Northern England

Having won just 19 of 162 seats in northern England at the 2005 general election, the Conservative party under David Cameron's leadership has made an electoral revival in the north of England a particular priority. This article first outlines the Conservatives' post-war electoral record in the north and considers the significance of northern England to the party's strategy at the next general election. It then moves on to examine the potential for socio-economics, identity, memory, ideology and party organisation to frustrate its current ambitions for revival. Finally, it outlines and evaluates the initiatives which the party has undertaken in the north of England since 2005.     

The 2019 Greek parliamentary election: retour à la normale

Abstract

The July 2019 parliamentary election was the first national election since Greece officially exited the eight-year bailout programmes in August 2018. It was preceded by three ballots on European Parliament, regional and municipal elections in May 2019, which served as a decompression valve for the electorate to punish the incumbent government and indicate a clear will for governmental change, since the conservative party ND won by a landslide. Whereas ND’s victory in the parliamentary election was anticipated, it was its scale that would define the shape of the new government. Increasing its score by 11.76 points since September 2015, ND won 39.85% of the vote, securing a comfortable majority of 158 out of 300 seats. This is the first majority government in Greece since 2011, marking the return of the country to a new normality. Even if SYRIZA failed to deliver the anti-bailout programme which had initially brought the party to the centre of electoral competition, it still gathered 31.53% of the vote, losing just 3.93 points since its last victory in 2015, hence securing its place as one of the two key actors in the new two-partyism. Party fragmentation was limited to six parliamentary parties instead of eight, with the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, having lost its parliamentary representation.     

When Second‐Best is Still a No‐Brainer: Why Labour Should Shoot for a Majority Coalition in May 2015

The chances of Labour winning the 2015 general election with a comfortable overall majority are vanishingly small. It could, however, emerge as the largest party or finish just a handful of seats behind the Conservatives. Either scenario would give it at least a chance—and a bigger chance than many realise, we argue—of forming a government. In that event, Labour may be faced with a choice between getting together with another party (or parties) to form a majority coalition or else forming a minority government (either on its own or with one or more partners), which could assemble different majorities for different pieces of legislation or try to negotiate a ‘confidence and supply’ agreement. Given the precedents from the UK and overseas, we argue that, faced with this dilemma, Labour should do all it can to form a majority coalition. We also argue that Labour can learn some useful lessons from the Cameron–Clegg coalition.     

Within‐party Allocation of Committee Seats: Evidence from Danish Local Elections

This article examines two traditional and four new explanations of committee composition. Using survey data on 541 Danish local politicians' pre‐election committee seat preferences and their actual post‐election committee seats, it is found that politicians are more likely to have their committee seat preferences fulfilled the less their preferences for the committees' policy domains differ from those of their fellow party members and the more specialised they are within the jurisdiction area of their preferred committee. Thus, the ex ante control of committee members sometimes observed in the American context is also relevant in the very different institutional setting of Danish local government. Moreover, a number of other explanations are found to be of equal relevance. In particular, individual‐level popular support is important to politicians' committee seat preference fulfilment and seats are distributed among party members in order to assure that everybody, at least to some extent, obtains a post that they find attractive. The findings thus suggest that ex ante control of committee members is but one of many concerns of parties. Accordingly, scholars should broaden their attention to other aspects of committee seat allocation, such as fair share norms and the popular support of politicians.     

Time for a change: The French elections of 1981 : II. The National Assembly elections

The Socialist Mitterrand won the French presidency by 52 per cent to the conservative Giscard's 48 per cent. To exercise real power, Mitterrand immediately dissolved the conservative Assembly, elected in 1978. The bonus of legitimacy enjoyed by the newly elected President, together with the constitutional arrangements which make effective, stable government dependent on an Assembly majority sympathetic to the President and the decline of the Communist party and the divisions within the Right all amplified Mittrrand's victory in the Assembly elections, won by the Left with 55 per cent to the Right's 44 per cent on the decisive ballot. With 38 per cent of the vote on the first ballot, the Socialists emerged with 268 seats after the second. That landslide (for France) was won on a low poll, thanks to the abstention and indiscipline of conservative and Communist supporters. It gives the Socialists a majority in the Assembly, only the second time in the Fifth Republic that a single party has had a majority by itself.     

Distinguishing between the effects of swing ratio and bias on outcomes in the US Electoral College, 1900–1992

We review a number of different statistical techniques for creating seats-votes curves and apply the most reliable of these to estimate seats-votes relationships in the US electoral college 1900–1992. We consider the now rejected claim, once firmly established as part of the common journalistic and even academic wisdom, that the US Electoral College has recently been strongly biased in favor of Republicans, and show that this claim was based largely on a confusion between bias (asymmetry in the electoral college gains earned by the votes received by different parties or candidates) and swing ratio (responsiveness of change in electoral college seat share to change in popular vote). Although there has been substantial bias during this century in the way the electoral college translates Democratic and Republican votes into electoral college seats, and for the earlier party of this century (from 1900 to 1940) that bias has been in favor of Republicans, to explain why many recent electoral college majorities have been so lopsided we must look not at bias but at swing ratio.We show that the swing ratio in the electoral college has generally been increasing since 1900, rising from an average value (1900–1924) around three to an average value (1976–1992) ranging from about five to about eight, depending upon which of the various statistical estimation techniques we use. Thus, for every one point vote share gain above 50 per cent, a winning presidential candidate in a two-candidate competition can now expect to pick up somewhere between a 5 percentage point and an 8 percentage point increase in electoral college seats—giving the illusion of mandate even for relatively close contests and frequently creating apparent landslides. We show that this historical rise in swing ratio in presidential elections is due almost entirely to changes in the responsiveness of outcomes in the US South as the influence of the Civil War slowly (very slowly) erodes. Drawing on the analysis of the determinants of bias and of swing ratio in the House of Representatives in Brady and Grofman (1991b), we show that the increases in electoral college swing can be accounted for by the nationalization of presidential competition as signaled by the decrease over time in the standard deviation of Democratic share of the two-party vote across states, and that changes in bias can be linked to changes in the magnitude of differences between the mean and the median of that distribution.     

The effect of electoral outcomes on political trust: A multi–level analysis of 23 countries

Competing theoretical claims exist in the literature on the effect of proportionality on political trust. To date, empirical studies yielded mixed results. In this paper, we examine a curvilinear effect of the proportionality of election outcomes on political trust using data from the European Social Survey (2006–2009). The findings show that political trust is indeed highest in countries with very proportional as well as in countries with very disproportional election outcomes and lowest in countries that fall in between. Election outcomes that are more fully inclusive and those that provide more accountability can both lead to higher levels of political trust. Next to the proportionality of the translation of votes into seats, this study investigates a broad range of election outcomes that are associated with (dis)proportionality i.e. the effect of the number of parties in elections, parliament and government, voting for the winning or losing party under different levels of proportionality and the clarity of responsibility.     

We’ve got them on the list: contacting,canvassing and voting in a British general election campaign

Many voters are canvassed by British political parties in the months and weeks immediately preceding a general election – but many are not. The parties are selective in whom they make contact with, and where. They focus on those in marginal constituencies who are likely to vote for them – and having identified them early in the process they contact them again, seeking to sustain that support in the seats where the contest overall will be either won or lost. A large panel survey conducted immediately before and after the 2010 general election allows detailed insight into that pattern of canvassing, identifying who the parties contacted, and where, in the six months prior to the election being called, and then who were contacted during the month immediately preceding polling day, and in how many different ways. Each party focused on its own supporters in the marginal constituencies, and in the middle-class neighbourhoods within those constituencies, but whereas the Conservatives, expecting to win the election, campaigned most intensively in the seats they lost by relatively small margins at the previous contest, Labour and the Liberal Democrats fought defensive campaigns in the seats that they won then. Such tactics were successful; the more ways in which respondents were contacted by a party, the more likely they were to vote for it.     

European elections: Sweden

A preliminary count of the votes of the election on 17 September 1979 gave the Social Democrats and Communists a majority in the unicameral Riksdag. But with the counting of postal votes (especially those from abroad) it soon became apparent that the three non‐Socialist parties in the Riksdag—the so‐called ‘bourgeois’ parties— would maintain their hairsbreadth parliamentary majority. The final count tipped the balance, and the bourgeois parties won a majority of a single seat (compared with one of eleven in the previous parliament). The electoral system is designed to reflect an exact proportionality of representation for parties whose support exceeds four per cent of the total vote. The turnout of around 91 per cent was slightly lower than in 1976, but remained at the high level characteristic of the 1970s.