Johnston, R., Rossiter, D., Hartman, T.K. orcid.org/0000-0001-9136-2784 et al. (3 more authors) (2018) Exploring constituency-level estimates for the 2017 British general election. International Journal of Market Research, 60 (5). pp. 463-483. ISSN 1470-7853
Abstract
Most opinion polls conducted during British general election campaigns report on each party’s estimated national vote share. Although of considerable interest, these data do not put the spotlight on the marginal seats, the constituencies targeted by the parties for intensive canvassing; these are where the contest for a majority in the House of Commons is won and lost. There have been some polls covering those constituencies as a whole, but very few of individual constituencies so there was very little reporting of the outcome for each party in those individual constituencies. That changed with the 2017 general election, when three analysts published estimates on the Internet of each party’s vote share separately for each constituency and with those data predicted which party would win each seat. This paper explores the veracity of those estimates, finding that although in general terms they accurately represented the relative position of each constituency in the share of each party’s votes, nevertheless their estimates of which marginal seats would be won by each were not as accurate. The implications of such polls, especially as their predictive ability is improved, are discussed.
Metadata
Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Authors. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in International Journal of Market Research. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Constituencies; general elections; Great Britain; opinion polling |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 14 May 2018 15:16 |
Last Modified: | 06 Sep 2019 11:29 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1177/1470785318778247 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1177/1470785318778247 |