So before we start, I recently got some
feedback that this site is a little dry. It's a political science
blog, so there is only so much I can do to rectify this; the point,
however, is valid. Since I am not a professional, my only real draw
is being accessible or entertaining.
Occasionally I can do this through a
jocular manner or a well placed image. Unfortunately, there is very
little to say – much less joke about – while we're still a month
out from the state election. So while I will keep the entertainment
value of these posts in mind, there's not a huge amount I can do at
this point. Realistically this is going to be most enjoyable for
those readers who play along at home.
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The box contains countless electoral
maps, and a dartboard to pin them to.
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For those of you without the time or
inclination to formulate separate predictions, this next month is not
going to be too riveting. Sorry. However, I will be providing TL;DR:
summaries at the bottom of my posts for those who find themselves
tuning out.
Griffith By-election Update:
For those who are playing along, we
have a prediction for Griffith to keep our eyes on. And although the
LNQ candidate Dr Bill Glasson is not admitting defeat, the seat can
confidently be called for the ALP, though with a slight swing to the
Coalition. So that's a point for me, and hopefully for most of you
too.
Review of Pendula:
The pre- and post-election pendula have
been long-standing features of Australian psephology, as a direct
result of their usefulness. As summarised
here
the pre-election pendulum had a 87% success rate as a predictive
tool, which is superior to the VDTA I used. It is difficult to assess
the success of the seat run-downs, but clearly the pendulum is one of
our most powerful tools.
However, this could easily be improved
by a more accurate model of predicting swings. Assuming a uniform
swing regularly fails to yield sufficiently accurate predictions, but
several analyses conducted last year on this blog failed to refine
this method:
This post
indicates that swing (i.e. volatility) is not noticeably related to
the seat's marginality – in other words being closely contested is
not at indication of the size of the swing.
This post
went on to show that a seat that had a large swing one election may
have a small swing in the next. This dispelled the possibility of
“large swing” and “small swing” seats, and led me to look at
seat volatility as a long-term trend (as in the seat run downs)
rather than an innate feature of particular areas.
This also gives us a helpful hint that
the factors that drive swing vary from election to election. I have
no doubt I will return to this topic in the future. When I do, I will
probably look at comparing the economic activities of a seat with the
main themes of the election (e.g. if water restrictions were a major
issue, did this provoke a greater swing in agricultural seats than
industrial ones?) I'll also keep an eye out for articles by other
psephologists that might give me some more hints on the topic.
I suspect that this is going to
continue to be a complicated issue, and one that may not be resolved
for a long time.
TD;DR: Successful prediction for
Griffith: ALP hold
Pendula are the most useful tool used
in my 2013 analysis
There is no known reliable way of
calculating seat-by-seat swing
Swing is not determined by
seat-specific data, but depends on the election
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