This week it’s the UK General Election, and lots of other countries either have elections coming soon or have recently voted. Lots of pollsters and political scientists have been attempting to predict the outcomes - but how successful will they be?
In this Studies Show election special, Tom and Stuart discuss the various quirks and downsides of opinion polls, and ask how scientific political science really is.
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Show notes
Ben Ansell’s book Why Politics Fails
The polls that got Brexit wrong (but where online polling did better)
The “Lizardman Constant”
Stuart’s 2023 i article on whether it’s really true that 25% of British people think COVID was a “hoax”
Recent-ish paper by Andrew Gelman on Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP)
Examples of recent MRPs from the UK (and one from the US from 2020)
The surprising utility of just using “uniform swing”
The very embarrassing 2010 “psychoticism” mixup between conservatism and liberalism - which even has its own Wikipedia page
Article on the replication crisis in political science
2017 article with examples of where political bias might’ve affected political science
The Michael LaCour case, where a political scientist fabricated an entire canvassing study and got it published in Science
Weirdly, even though the study was fake, the principle behind it does seem to be correct
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. We’re grateful to Prof. Ben Ansell for talking to us about polling. Any errors are our own.
Episode 42: Election special