Understanding Elections through Statistics

Polling, Prediction, and Testing

Ole J. Forsberg

• Publisher: Chapman and Hall/CRC
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000205800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Elections are random events. From individuals deciding whether to vote, to people deciding for whom to vote, to election authorities deciding what to count, the outcomes of competitive democratic elections are rarely known until election day…or beyond. Understanding Elections through Statistics: Polling, Prediction, and Testing explores this random phenomenon from two points of view: predicting the election outcome using opinion polls and testing the election outcome using government-reported data.

Written for those with only a brief introduction to statistics, this book takes you on a statistical journey from how polls are taken to how they can—and should—be used to estimate current popular opinion. Once an understanding of the election process is built, we turn toward testing elections for evidence of unfairness. While holding elections has become the de facto proof of government legitimacy, those electoral processes may hide a dirty little secret of the government illicitly ensuring a favorable election outcome.

This book includes these features designed to make your statistical journey more enjoyable:

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• Vignettes of elections, including maps, to provide concrete bases for the material

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• In-chapter cues to help one avoid the heavy math—or to focus on it

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• End-of-chapter problems designed to review and extend that which was covered in the chapter

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• Many opportunities to turn the power of the R statistical environment to the enclosed election data files, as well as to those you find interesting

From these features, it is clear the audience for this book is quite diverse. This text provides mathematics for those interested in mathematics, but also offers detours for those who just want a good read and a deeper understanding of elections.

Author

Ole J. Forsberg holds PhDs in both political science and statistics. He currently teaches mathematics and statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Knox College in Galesburg, IL.

Part I

Estimating Electoral
Support

This book opens with a thorough examination of techniques for estimating a candidate's current electoral support, both now and in the future. The mathematics are based on the binomial and the normal distributions, and the assumption that the data collected are representative of the population.

This part starts with Chapter 1 providing an overview of polling and simple methods for estimating candidate support. Chapter 2 explores polling questions in greater detail, often resulting in mathematical complexity. However, by the end of Chapter 2, one is quite able to evaluate polls and how the estimates were arrived at.

Chapter 3 takes the next step and looks at methods for combining polls to better estimate support. The methods focus on the data itself, as well as on comparing methods. This chapter ends with a method for predicting the result of a future election.

Finally, Chapter 4 applies all of the methods covered in the first part to the Brexit vote of 2016. This should emphasize that pollsters have several techniques, but none are entirely foolproof. As with all statistics, they rely on two important assumptions: The sample is representative of the population, and the people responding to the survey are correctly answering the posed question.

1

Polling 101

Firms produce myriad polls each election cycle, with each poll attempting to accurately estimate the proportion of the voting population holding a given position. For instance, during the lead-up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, there were over 100 polls taken. The polls were not consistent; their estimated support for independence ranged from 25% to 49%. In fact, even those polls taken in the final week of the campaign varied in their estimated support from 41% to 47%.

In this chapter, we will begin our study of elections by focusing on obtaining information from opinion polls. Here, we will take the simplest polling scheme and build the statistical foundation to a deeper understanding of polls, how they are performed, and what they can tell us. Along the way, we will come to a deeper understanding of the causes of that variation, as well as its effects.

The Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014

While the theory of the nation-state arguably dates from the early nineteenth century, the idea of a separate Scotland dates from at least the Middle Ages, echoing its separation from (and frequent battles with) England. [32] It was the personal union between the two kingdoms (1603–1707) that set the stage for an uneasy legal union between the two: The Treaty of Union of 1707, which joined the Kingdom of Scotland to the Kingdom of England to form Great Britain. [32] Since then, the union has gone through phases of strength and weakness, of unity and conflict. With the rise of the ideal of the nation-state, Scots began agitating more strongly for independence. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, the United Kingdom began a series of moves to place more local power in the hands of the Scots to keep the United Kingdom whole.

That we are still discussing Scottish independence as being a (possible) future event strongly points to the success of devolution. However, Scottish independence remains an issue in the United Kingdom, with the Scottish National Party (SNP) being a significant power in the Scottish parliament, known as Holyrood. With the success of SNP and its pro-independence platform, it was inevitable that Scotland would...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Part I: Estimating Electoral Support
• Part II: Testing Election Results
• Bibliography
• Index