As with last time round, I’m weighting the lowess trend line seen here by the number of respondents in the sample. Unfortunately, one of the polling companies, TermometroPolitico, is using an internet panel; because of the differences in make-up of internet panels compared to phone panels (and neither is perfect), certain cases tend to be weighted more heavily, which means the standard error might still be high even if the number of respondents is large.

At the moment, termometropolitico seems to be weighting on past vote recall and demographics; most phone interviewers just weight on demographics. My only concern about this is that respondents will falsely remember that they voted for the ‘winners’  in 2008, which might depress the centre-right’s vote share. Indeed, Termometropolitico’s estimates for the PdL tend to be on the low side.

That was fun.

This year, I’m aggregating the polling data for the European Parliament election — the Italian part, anyway.

This is less fun.

As everyone knows, European Parliament elections are second-order elections. Voters use them not to vote on the issues — they don’t know about the issues — but instead to give the government a progress report.

And whilst progress reports are interesting, your view of government performance might not be rocked that much by campaign events. And that’s when there is a campaign — so far, the parties have promised to spend less “in light of the current economic climate”.

With that out of the way, I present you with some flat lines: