The Conservative Party looks set to win the 2015 UK election with considerably more seats than anyone predicted. After weeks of polling putting it neck-and-neck with Labour, the incumbents are on course to dominate the House of Commons – either as a minority or with a very slim majority. Labour has had a disastrous night and leader Ed Miliband faces a deeply uncertain future.
The SNP has done even better than predicted, winning the majority seats in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats have been as good as obliterated and could end up with just ten seats – well below an already disappointing prediction. While party leader Nick Clegg survived in Sheffield Hallam, big names including Vince Cable and Danny Alexander have lost their seats.
A night for losing
Overall, this election has produced a long list of losers. Labour’s performance is very disappointing for a party that thought it would be close enough to the Conservatives to make a credible claim on power.
Equally, the Liberal Democrats are huge losers, party luminaries such as Vince Cable, Danny Alexander and Simon Hughes have fallen to the huge swing against the party. UKIP is yet another loser. Although it won a sizable share of the vote, only one of its candidates has been elected so far – Douglas Carswell.
Although it painted the electoral map of Scotland yellow, even the SNP can be seen as a loser. Rather than being in a position to offer tacit support to a Labour-led government in return for a new deal for Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues find themselves facing the prospect of dealing with a Conservative government bent on staying in power without any assistance from a party that openly campaigned to lock David Cameron out of Downing Street.
A terrible night for forecasters
Finally, the election forecasters are clearly losers too. Broadly similar forecasts became commonplace during the election campaign. The Conservatives and Labour ran neck-and-neck, with each party having approximately one third of the vote.
At no time did any of the forecasts (and there were many of them) give either of the major parties a majority in parliament.
However, one does not have to be a curmudgeon to insist that the prognosticators deserve precious little credit for getting this right. Given the abundance of poll information and sophisticated statistical tools available, the generic prediction that no party would get a working majority was not particularly difficult. What the forecasters did much worse was predicting the number of seats the parties would win.
Most forecasts underestimated the Conservative seat total by a wide margin. Across seven such efforts published the day before the election, the point forecasts for the average number of seats allocated to the Conservatives was 279, with a range from 273 to 284. And as has become clear, the Lib Dem losses and SNP gains were also both significantly underestimated.
The usual health warnings were issued in the form of statistical uncertainty estimates, but these invitations to prudence were given less attention than they deserved by most consumers of the numbers.
In the end, the problem for forecasters is as familiar as it is vexing – translating votes into seats. Even with high quality survey data with huge sample sizes, predicting hundreds of constituency-level results in a first-past-the-post electoral system with varying patterns of interparty competition remains a risky business. The 2015 election result forcefully illustrates the point.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
The SNP has done even better than predicted, winning the majority seats in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats have been as good as obliterated and could end up with just ten seats – well below an already disappointing prediction. While party leader Nick Clegg survived in Sheffield Hallam, big names including Vince Cable and Danny Alexander have lost their seats.
A night for losing
Overall, this election has produced a long list of losers. Labour’s performance is very disappointing for a party that thought it would be close enough to the Conservatives to make a credible claim on power.
Equally, the Liberal Democrats are huge losers, party luminaries such as Vince Cable, Danny Alexander and Simon Hughes have fallen to the huge swing against the party. UKIP is yet another loser. Although it won a sizable share of the vote, only one of its candidates has been elected so far – Douglas Carswell.
Although it painted the electoral map of Scotland yellow, even the SNP can be seen as a loser. Rather than being in a position to offer tacit support to a Labour-led government in return for a new deal for Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues find themselves facing the prospect of dealing with a Conservative government bent on staying in power without any assistance from a party that openly campaigned to lock David Cameron out of Downing Street.
A terrible night for forecasters
Finally, the election forecasters are clearly losers too. Broadly similar forecasts became commonplace during the election campaign. The Conservatives and Labour ran neck-and-neck, with each party having approximately one third of the vote.
At no time did any of the forecasts (and there were many of them) give either of the major parties a majority in parliament.
However, one does not have to be a curmudgeon to insist that the prognosticators deserve precious little credit for getting this right. Given the abundance of poll information and sophisticated statistical tools available, the generic prediction that no party would get a working majority was not particularly difficult. What the forecasters did much worse was predicting the number of seats the parties would win.
Most forecasts underestimated the Conservative seat total by a wide margin. Across seven such efforts published the day before the election, the point forecasts for the average number of seats allocated to the Conservatives was 279, with a range from 273 to 284. And as has become clear, the Lib Dem losses and SNP gains were also both significantly underestimated.
The usual health warnings were issued in the form of statistical uncertainty estimates, but these invitations to prudence were given less attention than they deserved by most consumers of the numbers.
In the end, the problem for forecasters is as familiar as it is vexing – translating votes into seats. Even with high quality survey data with huge sample sizes, predicting hundreds of constituency-level results in a first-past-the-post electoral system with varying patterns of interparty competition remains a risky business. The 2015 election result forcefully illustrates the point.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
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