politicalbetting.com

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

Previously, I examined how conception and maternity rates had changed in England and Wales during the 2010s. Now for the tricky part – should the government seek to alter demographic trends, and if so, why, and how? In September 2021, the Social Market Foundation (SMF) published a briefing paper titled Baby bust and baby boom: Examining the liberal case for pronatalism. I’d recommend reading it in full as it provides a very good assessment of this subject. The paper assesses…

Read More Read More

The ONS reported in October 2021 that “the total fertility rate for England and Wales in 2020 fell to 1.58 children per woman, the lowest since records began in 1938.” Contrary to predictions of a baby boom, conceptions during the first COVID lockdown fell and didn’t begin to pick up until after restrictions were eased. What happens to fertility rates post-COVID remains to be seen. As a student of politics, it’s a subject that I’ve always been curious about. To…

Read More Read More