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1) MACKINDER AND THE HEARTLAND Between 1909 and 1943 geographer Halford John Mackinder outlined the Heartland theory which goes like this. You can split the world into three parts: The World-Island (Europe, Asia, and Africa combined), the Offshore Islands (British Isles, Japan, etc) and the Outlying Islands (North America, South America, and Oceania). The World-Island can in turn be split into three: the Heartland (approx the Soviet Union), the Southern Heartland (basically Africa), and the Rimlands (the bits between the…

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With just over a week to go until the Northern Irish Assembly Election [2022] commences, The chips are down, the heat is on and the pressure is truly immense! With Sinn Féin [SF] making significant gains within the 2017 Assembly Election, The polls since October 2020 have SF as the largest party. As we are all aware [Needless to mention], anything can happen in an Election (Specifically within Northern Ireland). I will be doing separate predictions within this topic. I…

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From PBer Cicero close to the Russian border (This was posted on the previous thread from a longstanding PBer) Greetings from a weary but determined Estonia. The official outlook is that we are likely to have a pretty “challenging” summer, and the latest expulsion of all Baltic diplomats in St. Petersburg and Pskov underlines the total collapse of relations with Russia. It is quite probable that the border will be closed soon. The entry of Finland into NATO before the…

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I recently looked at Labour/Lib Dem tactical voting since 1983 and noted that the analysis didn’t work quite so well for 1997. In 1997, the Lib Dems won 46 seats. This was up 26 on their total of 20 in 1992 and was achieved despite their share of the GB vote falling by 1.2 percentage points (pp). To what extent was this made possible by tactical voting? Boundary changes for the 1997 general election make this a little tricky to…

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A look over the odds and latest polls All he needs to do is to make Jadot a nice offer and he will be in a strong running. On the assumption he accrues all the Jadot vote share (and none of anyone else’s, such as Poutou’s), he will be 5% ahead of 3rd-placed Le Pen (Ipsos), 0.5% behind her and 2.5% ahead of 4th-placed Pécresse (Ifop), and 2% behind her and 3% ahead of Pécresse (OpinionWay). Zemmour and Pécresse would…

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Following the stunning success for the Liberal Democrats at the North Shropshire by-election, former YouGov head, Peter Kellner, wrote in the Guardian: Byelection campaigns develop their own momentum: tactical voting in general elections is never as great. But back in 1997, when Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown led their respective parties, tactical shifts of just a few percentage points cost the Conservatives about 30 seats they would otherwise have held. Nothing like that happened in 2019. Lib Dems could not…

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Last September, the politics team at Smarkets decided to start offering a market on one local by-election every week. We’ve had a look back at the results to see if we could learn anything about whether the betting markets provided any useful information about the outcomes. On average, there are about five local by-elections across the UK every Thursday. Unsurprisingly, we’re usually going to pick whichever one we think looks the most competitive. (One other factor we sometimes consider is…

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This is the second thread on the theory behind the recently established Smarkets market on the prospects of a Conservative lead by end of January (covered here).  The first part presented the theory of this bet.   This part presents a simplified worked example and has a mathematical annex, following which: The next part will examine historic evidence on the volatility of opinion polls, which is an important input variable and interesting in itself The final thread will look at the…

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