We’re now officially in the final throes of a very bad case of election fever. Or at least the wonks are. Here is my latest take on the last polls. Bonus round: Why Bavaria does not mean a thing, and how this effects the Merkel-O-Meter.
I’ve been pooling the German pre-election polls since early this summer, and have published preliminary findings since August. People keep asking me the same questions, so here is my FAQ on pooling the polls.
State of Play: From Momentum to Peer’s Finger The German media have been particularly excitable this week. They kicked off with floating the idea that there was momentum in the polls (“SPD up by almost two points!”) and concluded with covering the infamous magazine cover portraying Peer Steinbrück flaunting his finger. Moreover, the idea that…
You may download the code and most recent replication data for my model that estimates latent party support and brazenly predicts the outcome of the 2013 German election from my dataverse. If you spot a bug or some other problem, please drop me a line.
In 335 hours, the campaign will be history, and it does not look good for the opposition parties. This round includes five new polls. They bring the probability of a third term for Merkel (aka the Merkel-O-Meter) to a new high of 98.4/99.7 per cent. And the Greens are plummeting a bit. Take the figures with loads of salt, but a change in government looks very unlikely.
The Polls [caption id="attachment_12655" align="alignleft" width="300"] Support for the Major German Parties, Estimates and Predictions (Week 35, 2013)[/caption] Exactly three weeks before the 18th Bundestag election, it’s time for another look at the polls. This weekend brings six new entries: One late result from week 33 that was only published a week ago, three polls…
Last week’s post on Merkel’s very good chances to win a third term created a bit of a stir. This week, I’m back with nine new polls (conducted between August 6 and August 19 by six different companies), which all point into the same direction: The probability of Merkel continuing as chancellor is 98 to 99 per cent.
The Polls Are Noisy Just over five weeks before the Bundestag election, there is much merriment about the current state of play. Support for the Liberals has been consistently below the electoral threshold of five per cent for months, which implies that Merkel’s coalition would not be able to continue after September. Consequently, everyone is…
Replication data for our forthcoming Political Analysis paper on our new, multinomial accuracy measure for bias in opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls) has just come online at the PA dataverse.
BinaryApe / Foter / CC BYIn a recent paper, we derive various multinomial measures of bias in public opinion surveys (e.g. pre-election polls). Put differently, with our methodology, you may calculate a scalar measure of survey bias in multi-party elections. Thanks to Kit Baum over at Boston College, our Stata add-on surveybias.ado is now available…