2:45pm. Turnout was down four points on two years ago at ten o’clock last night. Clemente Mastella is on Tg2, as a commentator. Che bello! Exit poll for Tg2: Senato PD 36.5- 42.5 versus PDL 39 – 46. Sinistra Arcobaleno collapses (5); IdV does well (3-4%), but better in the Camera. Destra also does well, [...]
Repubblica.it reports that turnout at 19.00 is down 3.5 points from 2006, from 52.2% to 48.7%. If turnout is lower than it was two years ago, who benefits? The ‘common wisdom‘ in political science is that higher turnout benefits centre-left parties. But Italy may defy the common wisdom – two years ago, Berlusconi presaged that [...]
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). [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]