General election 2015
Understanding Ed Miliband’s failed attempt to renew social democracy
Despite many seeing Ed Miliband as being responsible for Labour’s 2015 defeat, much more contributed to the party’s failures, explains Eunice Goes. Drawing on her latestbook, she writes that the European context of crisis and austerity created a situation that Labour – together with other European social democratic parties – failed to steer through successfully. […]
‘Too close to call’? Accounting for satisfaction with party leadership would have helped better predict the General Election
A good predictor of electoral outcomes over the past nine UK general elections has been survey questions asking about satisfaction with the leaders of the two main parties. That measure, however, combines responses from people who support the party and those who don’t. Here, Ruth Dixon explores leader satisfaction among party supporters as a way of measuring the level of ‘enthusiastic […]
2015 was not an ‘internet election’ but both data and social tools did matter
Andy Williamson writes that while the 2015 General Election was not an internet election, it was an election where both data and social tools mattered. He looks back what can be learned from the digital campaigns in 2015 and predicts how these lessons are likely to shape the use of digital ahead of elections taking […]
With the diagnosis confirmed pollsters can start working on their own solutions to the 2015 polling error
The preliminary findings of the inquiry into 2015 pre-election polls were presented yesterday at the Royal Statistical Society. As well as pinpointing unrepresentative samples as the most viable explanation, the panel took the time to emphasise the factors that did not contribute to the error. Here, Anthony Wells offers an overview of the key points made in […]
The best of Democratic Audit’s 2015 General Election coverage
The 2015 election result took almost everyone by surprise, with the Conservatives winning a narrow majority despite predictions of another hung parliament or a minority government. In addition to contributing to LSE’s General Election live-blog, Democratic Audit offered a wide range of pre- and post- election analysis. Catch up with some of the best below. […]
Like the polling debacle of 1992, 2015 offers an opportunity to innovate
May’s election results proved to be significantly different from the opinion polls. Since then, the leading polling organisations have devoted considerable energy to determining what went wrong and how their approaches can be improved. Following the publication of YouGov’s diagnosis, Anthony Wells discusses the main issues that were identified, possible solutions and the implications for the polling […]
The nature of modern political rhetoric is a big reason that voters were turned off by the turgid 2015 General Election
Politics is an art which takes place largely through the exchange of written and spoken words, with some of the greatest politicians also excellent speakers and rhetoricians. But thanks to mass – and now digital – media, the nature of political rhetoric has changed. Alan Finlayson traces the changes in the form of political rhetoric since […]
Was the 2015 election the most disproportional ever? It depends how you measure it
The 2015 election has been described as both one of the most disproportional elections ever and one of the least. Alan Renwick discusses the notion of electoral disproportionality and weighs up the relative merits of the different indexes that have been developed to measure it. Similar Posts16 things you need to know about what will […]
Electoral bias in the UK after the 2015 General Election
Most discussion of the UK’s 2015 election so far has focussed on the unexpected Conservative majority. But Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston reveal another remarkable story hidden just below the surface. The electoral system not only deals unfairly with the smaller parties. It is also biased in how it treats the Conservatives relative to Labour. But the […]
The 2015 General Election was further proof that First Past the Post is not fit for purpose
The 2015 General Election produced an unexpected majority government, however it did so despite the rise of smaller parties such as the Greens and UKIP, who between them only won 2 seats, despite polling around 5 million votes. Chris Terry and Jess Garland argue that the result shows that the First Past the Post electoral […]
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