Are Certain Elections More Predictable than Others? A Series of Bivariate Analyses of the Impact of Electoral Characteristics Upon the Predictability of British National Elections from 1945 to 2017

Tudor, Jack

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3601958

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“…These issues are well-rehearsed in a voluminous literature, where the central question is how pollsters can adapt their methods to deal with them (for detailed reviews see : Crespi, 1988;Moon, 1999;Tudor 2017). In the UK, large swathes of this type of research responded to dramatic polling misses in the 1970 (Abrams, 1970;Koff, 1972) and 1992(detailed in: Fisher and Lewis-Beck, 2016 elections, as well as the perceived polling failures of the 2010s (see, for example: Curtice, 2016;Mellon and Prosser, 2017;Prosser and Mellon, 2018;Sturgis et al, 2016).…”

Section: Electoral Context In the Study Of Polling Errormentioning

confidence: 99%

A moving target? An analysis of the impact of electoral context on polling error variation in both British and international general elections

Tudor

Wall

2021

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties

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In this article, we argue that electoral context affects the projection mechanisms inherent in polling. This insight applies both to the estimation of party vote shares by pollsters and to poll-driven substantive political expectations. To test this argument, we analyse 794 in-campaign polls covering the UK's 21 post-war general elections, as well as an updated version of Jennings and Wlezien's (2018) international polling dataset. We demonstrate that the election level houses a substantial portion of the observed variance in polling error. This finding is valid across several modelling approaches and a range of measures of polling accuracy both within and beyond the UK. Within the UK, we show that the election level is a particularly important locus of variance when it comes to analysing whether polls give rise to misleading substantive expectations about election results.

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