Poll shows that 71% of respondents are opposed to presidential nomination of the head of France Télévisions. 11% have no opinion; 18% agree with Sarkozy that it is “logical” that the state should name the head of a corporation it owns.
Unfortunately Le Parisien does not provide the text of the questions asked; Le Monde is […]
Now that the final results are (almost) in, let’s take a look at what happened. Easing gently in, let’s start by comparing the poll averages with the final results for each party:
Party
Last point on the trend line
Actual vote-share, Camera
Difference
Sinistra Arcobaleno
6.863%
3.084%
-3.779
Partito Democratico
34.040%
33.174%
-0.876
Lega Nord
5.060%
8.297%
3.237%
Italia dei Valori
3.350%
4.371%
1.02%
Popolo delle Libertà
38.974%
37.388%
-1.58%
UDC
5.917%
5.624%
-0.294%
If there was no movement over the last two weeks […]
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 only […]
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, […]
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%.
