Electoral Calculus is a

political forecasting Political forecasting aims at forecasting the outcomes of political events. Political events can be a number of events such as diplomatic decisions, actions by political leaders and other areas relating to politicians and political institutions. T ...

web site A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Wikip ...

which attempts to predict future

United Kingdom general election This is a list of United Kingdom general elections (elections for the UK House of Commons) since the first in 1802. The members of the 1801–1802 Parliament had been elected to the former Parliament of Great Britain and Parliament of Ireland ...

results. It considers national factors but excludes local issues.

Main features

The site was developed by Martin Baxter, who was a financial analyst specialising in

mathematical modelling A mathematical model is a description of a system using mathematical concepts and language. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed mathematical modeling. Mathematical models are used in the natural sciences (such as physics, ...

. The site includes maps, predictions and analysis articles. It has separate sections for

elections in Scotland Scotland has elections to several bodies: the Scottish Parliament, the United Kingdom Parliament, local councils and community councils. Before the United Kingdom left the European Union, Scotland elected members to the European Parliament. Sco ...

and

Northern Ireland Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...

. From April 2019, the headline prediction covered the

Brexit Party Reform UK is a right-wing populist political party in the United Kingdom. It was founded with support from Nigel Farage in November 2018 as the Brexit Party, advocating hard Euroscepticism and a no-deal Brexit, and was briefly a significant ...

and Change UK – The Independent Group. Change UK was later removed from the headline prediction ahead of the 2019 general election as their poll scores were not statistically significant.

Methodology

The site is based around the employment of scientific techniques on data about the United Kingdom's electoral geography, which can be used to calculate the

uniform national swing Uniform national swing, or UNS is a system for translating opinion polls, which give overall vote proportions, to expected eventual parliamentary seats in a constituency based first past the post system, as in the UK general elections. Under the u ...

. It takes account of national polls and trends but excludes local issues. The calculations were initially based on what is termed the ''Transition Model'', which is derived from the additive

model. This uses national swings in a proportional manner to predict local effects. The ''Strong Transition Model'' was introduced in October 2007, and considers the effects of strong and weak supporters. The models are explained in detail on the web site.

Predictions

Across the eight general elections from 1992 to 2019:Electoral Calculus https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/trackrecord.html *EC correctly predicted the party which won the most seats in seven out of eight (all except 1992). *EC correctly predicted the majority party in four (1997, 2001, 2005, 2019) and the hung parliament outcome in 2010. *The mean polling error for the two largest parties was 4.8%.

Reception

It was listed by ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' in 2004 as one of the "100 most useful websites", being "the best" for predictions. In 2012 it was described by PhD student Chris Prosser at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

as "probably the leading vote/seat predictor on the internet". Its detailed predictions for individual seats have been noted by Paul Evans on the localdemocracy.org.uk

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

. Academic Nick Anstead noted in his observations from a 2010 ''Personal Democracy Forum'' event, that Mick Fealty of

Slugger O'Toole Slugger O'Toole is a weblog started in June 2002 by political analyst Mick Fealty. It began life as Letter to Slugger O'Toole, focused primarily on news and comment about Northern Ireland. From the beginning it has drawn its readership from a ...

considered Electoral Calculus to be "massively improved" in comparison with the

swingometer The swingometer is a graphics device that shows the effects of the swing from one party to another on British election results programmes. It is used to estimate the number of seats that will be won by different parties, given a particular nationa ...

. With reference to the 2010 United Kingdom general election, it was cited by journalists

Andrew Rawnsley Andrew Nicholas James Rawnsley (born 5 January 1962) is a British political journalist and broadcaster. A columnist and chief political commentator for ''The Observer'', he has written two books on New Labour. Early life Rawnsley was born in Le ...

and Michael White in ''

''.

John Rentoul John Rentoul (born 1958) is a British journalist. He is the chief political commentator for ''The Independent''. Early life Rentoul was born in India, where his father was a minister of the Church of South India. Educated at Wolverhampton Gra ...

in ''

The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...

'' referred to the site after the election.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Electoral Calculus
British political websites Elections in the United Kingdom Electoral geography Opinion polling in the United Kingdom Psephology Mathematical modeling