As if to underline my warning (in Why you should ignore opinion poll seat projections), the latest ABP News-AC Nielsen opinion poll exemplifies how opaque seat projections are in comparison with more straightforward vote share estimates. Look at the table below that compares AC Nielsen's vote share and seat predictions over two successive months in 2014: …
Month: February 2014
Political parties’ Facebook “likes”
This measure of political party support has some obvious limitations (viz. self-selection and an upper-income/urban/education bias) but is still, I think, worth noting, especially the Aam Aadmi Party's strong performance. https://twitter.com/dubeyamitabh/status/437635383233224704
Why you should ignore opinion poll seat projections
It is a truth universally acknowledged that Indian public opinion polls are much better at predicting party vote shares than they are at extrapolating to seats won in parliament or state assemblies. That’s because vote shares translate into seats in an unpredictable way under India’s multiparty “first-past-the-post” electoral system. For example, the Indian National Congress …
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BJP-ruled states more communally violent
Following Chris's response to my previous post, correctly questioning whether it makes sense to use vaguely defined "incidents" to measure communal violence, it took me a while to locate better data. I found some up-to-date statistics on casualties of communal violence in a table annexed to a 10 December 2013 Ministry of Home Affairs reply to a question …
How Mail Today got its analysis of communal violence exactly wrong
If anyone needed proof that a course in statistical inference is necessary for journalists, it was provided by this report in the newspaper Mail Today on incidents of communal violence between 2011 and 2013 (written by Abhishek Bhalla). There was even a tweet: https://twitter.com/gauravcsawant/status/432400629794095104 The main claim in the article was: The Congress has always found …
Continue reading How Mail Today got its analysis of communal violence exactly wrong
Chunauti 