Last week I went along to the first public meeting of the investigation into what went wrong with the polling before the general election. It is the British Polling Council’s attempt to find out why all the pollsters spotted that the Scottish National Party was going to do well and […] Read more »
NATO Publics Blame Russia for Ukrainian Crisis, but Reluctant to Provide Military Aid
Publics of key member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) blame Russia for the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Many also see Russia as a military threat to other neighboring states. But few support sending arms to Ukraine. Moreover, at least half of Germans, French and Italians say their […] Read more »
Why the GOP Can’t Get No Satisfaction
… In the United Kingdom’s general election, Prime Minister Cameron won on a vision of a dynamic, competitive Britain as a land of future opportunity for working families. Miliband was promising them only a return to the past: 1970s-style rent control, re-nationalization of some services, and energy price controls were, […] Read more »
Right-Wing Wins Come at Too High a Price
… Not since 1886, the press widely reported, has a sitting party increased the number of seats and vote share as the Conservatives just did. Nearly every public poll reported a dead-even contest between Labour and the Conservatives. How could British pollsters have gotten it so wrong? Just two months […] Read more »
SurveyMonkey Was The Other Winner Of The U.K. Election
To more than one pundit, last week’s election in the United Kingdom looked like it would be the closest in a generation. But at SurveyMonkey’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters, thousands of miles away, things looked very different: Respondents to an online poll conducted by the Internet survey company from April […] Read more »
The failure of the polls in Britain
… So where did our cousins go wrong? First, I believe they were operating on the wrong level of analysis. Their data were on one level and what they were trying to predict was on another. The polls were looking at the percentage of the national vote each party was […] Read more »