People around the world were shocked when Hillary Clinton, ahead in many polls, didn’t end up the U.S.‘ president-elect. But that doesn’t mean the polls themselves were wrong.
Survey findings are typically considered in isolation in the media, with no understanding of context, of what is within and what is beyond the expected.
While pre-election polls got their sums wrong, and seemed to ignore biases in the rush to publish, a far more accurate call was being made in the betting shops of Britain.
Recent polls have put Labour and the Conservatives in what seems to be an unshakable dead heat. The latest Ashcroft poll puts them both on 33%. This takes the parties back to exactly where they were in…
Beyond polls and betting markets, how else can we gauge how people feel ahead of future elections? Social media is a goldmine, and one of the newer ways to tap into it is with a “social mood reader”.
Tuesday, November 6 was a game changer. The Republican Party in the United States has come to understand that the political environment has been altered. White males can no longer dictate the results of…
New polls frequently announce that a significant proportion of the population is concerned about an issue or willing to sacrifice for a cause, from environmental sustainability to Third World debt. These…
Professor of Economics and Finance. Director of the Betting Research Unit and the Political Forecasting Unit at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University
Senior Lecturer in Political Science: Research Fellow at the Cairns Institute; Research Associate for Centre for Policy Futures, University of Queensland, James Cook University
Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science and Director of the Sheffield Q-Step Centre (The University of Sheffield); Statistical Ambassador (Royal Statistical Society), University of Sheffield