Un benvenuto ai lettori della Repubblica, and welcome to readers of the FT. You might find the following posts interesting:
Polling accuracy: what happened last time.
Where the battleground regions are
A post on methodology
Further notes on methodology are available in the last polling round-up, available here.
UPDATE: There’s a reason academics shouldn’t blog so much. I’ve now realised that the analysis below is mistaken; I had calculated the variance of Callegaro and Gasperoni’s measure incorrectly. The revised picture – which I’m still working on – consequently looks a lot flatter, with little or no change over the last fifteen days of [...]
Now that polls can no longer be published, we can take a final look at our trend line, and see where it is:
How exciting: the trend is exactly where it was before the polls were added, with a gap of 7.3%. And, indeed, before the previous batch of polls was added.
If you believe that there [...]
The penultimate day in which polls can be publicised, and a number of new polls mean – surprise surprise! – little change to the gap between the PdL and the PD, which remains at 7.3%.
I’m still projecting a majority for the PdL, but I’m less confident of this judgement for reasons noted in the last [...]
I return from my Easter break with a bevy of new polls, many of which highly contested, but all of which hardly change the headline figure: the gap remains roughly the same, at 7.5%.
Nevertheless, interesting stuff is still going on. The nature of the competition continues to squeeze the smaller parties in this bipolar quadrille, [...]
I’ve begun to notice a certain rhetorical trope in the electoral campaign, which can be easily adapted to a number of topics, provided you don’t care about getting your facts wrong.
The general form is to say
“Italy is/cannot become the only western country/only democratic country in which…” X,
“L’Italia è/non puo diventare l’unico paese occidentale/l’unico paese democratico [...]
Excellent article from the Sole 24 Ore on the parties’ campaign expenditure.
New polls from Demopolis, Agron and Makno – the last two of which are new entrants to the race behind the election, the race for least convincing pollster – take the gap up to 8.4%.
The methodology that I – and everyone else – has been using is uniform national swing (UNS) – the idea that, across the country, the same percentage of people will shift from one coalition to the other compared to last time round. Now, uniform national swing no longer works even in its homeland, the UK. [...]
Dal Legno Storto:
C’e’ chi, come Claudio Tito su Repubblica, racconta di un sondaggio commissionato da Silvio Berlusconi a un’agenzia americana che preconizza il rischio ‘pareggio’ al Senato. E chi, come Augusto Minzolini sulla Stampa, racconta che dentro il Pdl inizia a trapelare qualche preoccupazione per una vittoria data troppo per scontata, che potrebbe trasmettere un [...]