The NATO summit in Warsaw that wrapped up on July 9 demonstrated once again that the defense spending effort of European allies remains a contentious issue in the alliance. On the eve of the summit, news reports indicated that American officials had prepared a briefing designed in part to “name […] Read more »
Automatic polling using Computational Linguistics: More reliable than traditional polling?
The outcome of the 2016 EU referendum did not only spell disaster for the incumbent prime minister and the Remain campaign. It also amounted to a PR disaster for the commercial pollsters, with YouGov, Populus, ComRes, ORB Ipsos-Mori and Survation all failing to correctly predict the outcome. … By contrast, […] Read more »
The ‘Referendum Bubble’: What can we learn from EU campaign polling?
With the EU Referendum coming just thirteen months after a General Election in which the predictions were proven so dramatically wrong, pollsters were more cautious about publicising polls over the course of the Referendum campaign. … Predicting Referendum results is even more difficult than predicting General Election results, and estimating […] Read more »
Calming the storm: Fighting falsehoods, fig leaves and fairy tales
… Now that the Referendum has happened and the storm has somewhat abated the question that demands urgent attention is how any future referendum might be conducted on the basis of a more rigorous – dare we suggest even fact-based – public discussion? … If major broadcasters have a public […] Read more »
The Trouble With Referendums
After Britain’s decision to leave the European Union via popular referendum last month, political turmoil ensued. But don’t let the near-collapse of the British government make you think governments will be dissuaded from using this form of supposedly direct democracy in future: Referendums are more popular than ever. … But, […] Read more »
How remain failed: The inside story of a doomed campaign
… The starting premise of the remain campaign was that elections in Britain are settled in a centre-ground defined by aversion to economic risk and swung by a core of liberal middle-class voters who are allergic to radical lurches towards political uncertainty. They could be identified, profiled and targeted by […] Read more »