The Library
Do party leadership contests forecast British general elections?
Tools
Tools
Tools
Murr, Andreas (2021) Do party leadership contests forecast British general elections? Electoral Studies, 72 . 102342. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102342 ISSN 0261-3794.
|
PDF
WRAP-Do-party-leadership-contests-forecast-British-gneral-elections-2021.pdf - Accepted Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 4.0. Download (1012Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102342
Abstract
When assessing election forecasts, two important criteria emerge: their accuracy (precision) and lead time (distance to event). Curiously, in both 2010 and 2015 the most accurate forecasts came from models having the longest lead time—albeit at most 12 months. Can we increase the lead time further, supposing we tolerate a small decrease in accuracy? Here, we develop a model with a lead time of more than 3 years. Our Party Leadership Model relies on the votes of MPs when selecting their party leader. We assess the forecasting quality of our model with both leave-one-out cross-validation and a before-the-fact forecast of the 2019 general election. Compared to both simple forecasting methods and other scientific forecasts, our model emerges as a leading contender. This result suggests that election forecasting may benefit from developing models with longer lead times, and that party leaders may influence election outcomes more than is usually thought.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Elections -- Great Britain, Political parties -- Great Britain, Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 21st century, Public opinion polls, Election forecasting -- Great Britain, Political campaigns -- Great Britain | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Electoral Studies | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Elsevier | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0261-3794 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | August 2021 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
|
||||||||
| Volume: | 72 | ||||||||
| Article Number: | 102342 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102342 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 5 May 2021 | ||||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 10 December 2022 | ||||||||
| Related URLs: |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
