A guest slot by Robert Smithson If you read The Telegraph, or the pb.com commenters, you could hardly fail to come to the conclusion that the Euro has been a disaster for all involved. Riots in the streets of Athens, austerity in Ireland, and the bumblings of Euro-summits serve only to reinforce the view. Yet, as always, the truth is rather more nuanced. Since January the first 1999, when the Euro was introduced, GDP per head in the Eurozone has…
Political Betting will be off-line tonight between about 1am and 4am. Hopefully, come tomorrow morning it will all be working perfectly. Thanks, Robert
Hi all, Over the next three or four days I will be susbstantially upgrading the Political Betting technical infrastructure. For those who care, the big changes are: A new faster, shinier main server An upgrade to the latest version of WordPress A huge upgrade to the Disqus commenting system (you’ll be able to ‘like’ particularly insightful comments, or those from tim or seanT) While I will try and minimise downtime, it’s quite likely that there will be substantial periods when…
Our database server will be switched this evening. Hopefully no-one will notice anything at all… but if we’re down, you know to blame me! Thanks Robert
Following a crash of our database server last night, I have migrated the database to Amazon’s new Relational Database Service. Hopefully, this will lead to better scalability and reliability. Some people (Seth O Logue and Old Nat…) lost comments in the migration, and I’m sorry about that. It is possible we will see some performance issues over the next couple of days as I tweak the configuration, but hopefully these will be short-lived. Right: off to bed now. Robert
Five Reasons Why UKIP Won’t Win In Buckingham (1) The Speaker’s Absolute Number of Votes Holds Up Very Well. Perhaps it’s because the speaker is a naturally prestigous role, but contested by the other parties or not, the speakers’ vote has tended to hold up very well. In fact if you look at the average votes the speaker has got, going back to 1974, and compares it to the average that parties polled in the surrounding elections then you see…
Two weeks ago, I introduced a new election forecasting model. This generated much heat, and a little light in the numerous comments. Many were scepticical, arguing that it used proportional swing, others asked how a model that produced such different results to Unified National Swing could be taken seriously. Many of the criticisms came from a lack of understanding of how the model – which we’ve nicknamed Voter Intention Prediction Analysis, or VIPA – works. This post explains why VIPA…
(This is a post from Robert Smithson, not Mike Smithson!) Electoral Calculus says a Conservative majority of 26.. Anthony Wells reckons it results in a 12 seat majority.. Hill & Knowlton has it as No Overall Control.. But could it really be 150 Tory majority? Yes. Because traditional election forecasting tools are flawed. Electoral Calculus, and the rest, use Unified National Swing as the bedrock of their analysis. But this has a fundamental defect: it assumes parties pile up votes…