Roberto D’Alimonte has been arguing that the outcome of the elections to Italian senate are a ‘lottery’, product of a fundamentally flawed electoral law, and thus almost impossible to predict. I agree that the current electoral law is flawed insofar as it makes it extremely difficult to produce any majority. I disagree that it’s impossible [...]
The very clever people at Bayesfor have made projections for the elections, based on presence in the media.The Bayesfor forecast suggests that the PdL will win 44.67%, the PD 38.37%, which is, as they note, more or less in line with polling trends (though slightly more favourable to the PD than my last poll-of-polls suggests). [...]
Minerva.as has published an article of mine on the Italian media. In many countries, a residual sense of national pride means that many claims, which would be readily assented to in a conversation between co-nationals, become hotly contested when made by outsiders. In Italy, the reverse phenomenon seems to operate, and Italians will without hesitation [...]
Okay, it refers to the First Republic, but this paper by Miriam Golden and Lucio Picci is excellent. Bottom line: more important government deputies got more pork; parties were unable to steer resources to districts in which they were marginal. Does this pattern continue today? Probably. In the face-to-face debate in 2006, one of the [...]
Now that the polls have closed, we’re forced to look at other methods of predicting the outcome of the election. One increasingly popular method is to use betting markets to assess implied probabilities. The chart below shows the implied probability from Betfair.com. The red line is Berlusconi, the blue, Veltroni. As you can see, there’s [...]
Thanks to Mario Callegaro (whose paper I too hastily criticised!), an excellent criticism of polling in Italy available at Sociologica.
According to the law on electoral polling, no opinion polls are to be published (or rather, “disseminated”) within the last fifteen days of the campaign. I presume the intent is so that voters aren’t influenced by polling and bounced into one of the two main effects (the band-wagon and under-dog effects respectively). Of course, this [...]