As counting day on 11 March approaches, it seems as difficult as ever to gauge which way the political wind in Uttar Pradesh (UP) is blowing. Even before the campaign began, pre-election opinion polls offered little help, showing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP)-Congress alliance neck and neck, with the Bahujan …
Continue reading Uttar Pradesh is the BJP’s to lose. Or is it?
An average of three recent opinion polls (here, here and here) shows that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)- and Janata Dal (United)(JD(U))-led alliances are locked in a statistical dead heat in the 2015 Bihar state election. This is a very creditable performance for the BJP. The party was long overshadowed by its partner of two …
A simple average of the five most recent opinion polls shows that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) are locked in a dead heat in the 2015 Delhi state election, with a projected 40% share of the vote each. There is considerable variation among the five polls in terms of the …
Every time the price of onions rises, pundits remind us (here and here) of what happened in Delhi in 1998, when a spike in the price of onions is believed to have contributed to the state election defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Inflation does appear to matter greatly to Indian voters: "price rise" was …
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) continues to advance in the opinion polls. The NDTV-Hansa survey projects a majority for the alliance if elections were held in March: https://twitter.com/ndtv/status/455743412189155329 The CNN-IBN-CSDS-The Week election tracker is more cautious in its forecast, but has also projected a 20-seat improvement in the NDA's seats tally over the …
As more and more opinion polls hit the headlines, it's worth recalling how they fared in the two most recent general elections: 2004 https://twitter.com/PankajPachauri/status/408269945563136000 2009 https://twitter.com/PankajPachauri/status/444016247303176192 Note: The figures in parentheses under the NDA and UPA columns are the respective seat tallies of the BJP and Congress Party.
Despite my critique of their use of communal violence data, the India Today Group graciously invited me to participate in a panel discussion on opinion polling at the India Today Conclave 2014 on Saturday, Mar 8. I made the following points: Parliamentary seat projections should be treated with skepticism because there is no simple relationship between …
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 …
Continue reading Why you should ignore opinion poll seat projections
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