Polling and Voting

The outcome of the Brexit referendum has sparked a wave of comments to understand who the Leave voters are. The evidence so far indicates that those who decided to leave the EU tend to be older, less educated and poorer than those who decided to remain in the EU. However, ...

Nate Silver is a statistician, writer, and the founder and editor-in-chief of the well-known blog FiveThirtyEight, who rose to fame in the political area through his incredibly accurate data-driven predictions of U.S. Presidential election results. Before the 2012 U.S. Presidential election Mr. Silver correctly predicted the outcomes in all 50 ...

The outcome of the recent regional election in Catalonia (which was held on September 27th) has been read very differently by the pro-independence and the pro-union camps. The former have emphasized that pro-independence parties won, for the first time in Catalan history, a clear majority of seats in the Catalan ...

There’s only so much you can do to keep up with the political machinations of other countries. If, like me, you live a long way from home, it is just about manageable to follow your own politics, those of the place you currently live, and what Donald Trump has been ...

Jeremy Corbyn’s overwhelming victory in the British Labour Party’s recent leadership election has given the party its most left-wing leader in its history. The outcome was completely unpredicted at the start of the contest, with the predominant view being that one of the moderate candidates – Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper ...

In the United States presidential elections are big business. More than fifteen months before the general election, candidates and their affiliated super-PACs have already raised almost $130 million. They will raise and spend many hundreds of millions more before the last ballot is counted. The vast majority of those dollars ...

How can we usefully summarise the accuracy of an election opinion poll compared to the real result of an election? In this blog, we describe a score we have devised to allow people to see how different polls compare in their reflection of the final election result, no matter how ...

Do MPs listen to interest groups instead of their voters? Citizens delegate the representation of their political preferences to Members of Parliament (MPs) who are supposed to represent their interests in the legislature. However, MPs are exposed to a variety of interest groups seeking to influence how MPs cast their vote on policy proposals. Every day, thousands of lobbyists approach our legislative representatives in Brussels, Washington and any other democratic capital to influence legislative votes in their favor.

The 2015 Turkish Parliamentary elections went, perhaps much to our surprise, relatively smoothly. The previously governing AK Parti (AKP) was denied for the first time in its history an absolute majority. The AKP received 41% of the votes (they achieved 49% in the previous parliamentary elections and 52% in the last presidential election). This won the AKP 258 of 550 available seats, 18 short of a majority.

Vote intention polls performed poorly at predicting the 2015 British General Election. What are the alternatives? Instead of asking citizens how they intend to vote, we might want to ask them who they think will win. I explore the accuracy of this approach at the LSE General Election 2015 Blog.