Introduction

The 2015 UK General Election looks like being one of the closest, and hardest to predict, for many years. With 650 seats being contested, one party needs to win more than half the seats (326) to be able to form a government. Most, if not all, polls are predicting a hung parliament, with the likelihood that the UK will have another coalition government, though what form that will take is open to much debate.

It is not difficult to find predictions for the election result. They tend to fall into two categories; the percentage share of the vote or the number of seats that will be won by each party. Of most interest is the number of seats that will be won by each party, as this is what determines the formation of the next government.

Wisdom of the Crowds

In 1907, Francis Galton reported in Nature an event that had taken place at a country fair, where around 800 people were asked to guess the weight of an ox. The average guess was 1,197 pounds. The actual weight was 1,198 pounds, which is close to the average guess to be considered just about spot on. Importantly, many of the people who participated could be considered experts, such as farmers and butchers, but many people were far from experts – just being people attending the fair. Also, importantly, not a single person guessed the correct weight and only one person guessed 1,197 and two people guessed 1,199.

This concept of the Wisdom of the Crowds was popularised in a 2004 book by James Surowiecki, arguing that the opinion of a large number of people will do better than the judgement of a few experts.

2010 General Election

Wisdom of the Crowds was used to predict the 2010 general election. Martin Boon, of ICM Research, showed that “that the Wisdom of Crowds approach at the 2010 general election would have produced the most accurate final pre-election prediction.”

Henretty and Jennings

Chris Henretty and Will Jennings have used the Wisdom of Crowds to predict the number of seats for each major party in the 2015 General Election. They surveyed 2,338 people, with 537 responding. They asked two questions, one about the percentage share of the votes and one about the number of seats for the major parties. Their report (published on 03 Mar 2015) gives the following predicted seats.

 

Party	Seats
Con	278.4
Lab	282.3
Lib Dem	24.8
SNP	28.7
Greens	1.9
Plaid Cymru	3.3
UKIP	6.6
Others	13.4

Our Data

Drawing inspiration from this study, we utilise other predictions, to see how it compares with the study of Henretty and Jennings. Our study looks at 24 different predictions, aggregating them to produce our predictions.

Our data is drawn from a variety of sources.

• The Henretty and Jennings study is used, recognising that it incoporates over 500 individual predictions.
• A recent BBC Panorama program asked Nate Silver for his predictions. Silver is an American statistician who has successfully predicted the outcome of the last two US presidential elections.
• Data was taken from several spread betting firms, taking the middle of the spread as their prediction.
• The London School of Economics asked a number of election forecasters at a conference they held on the 27 Mar 2015 for their predictions. These have been incorporated into our predictions below.
• Some newspapers publish predictions, and these are used in our model.
• Some on-line prediction web sites were used.

We decided against using the 2010 results, or the current parliamentary standings, although we show the predictions using these two additional pieces of data, just for completeness.

One issue that has to be considered is missing data. Predictors do not always provide predictions for all the parties, but provide an aggregated figure in Others for some of the parties. Some predictors also exclude Northern Ireland so they only supply 632 predictions, rather than the full 650. We work around this as best we can.

In order to calculate our predictions, we averaged all the polls under consideration. We normalise the figures for each party so that the total number of seats adds up to 650.

Predictions

Our predictions are shown in the table below. The Excl. 2010 column shows the predictions when the 2010 results or the current parliamentary standings are not taken into account. The Incl. 2010 results are shown just for comparison.

 

	Excl. 2010	Incl. 2010
Con	279	281
Lab	274	272
Lib Dem	24	27
SNP	46	42
Greens	1	1
Plaid Cymru	3	3
UKIP	3	3
Others	20	21

The two sets of figures are reasonably close with the obvious differences being the higher prediction of the SNP and the lower prediction of the Lib Dems, which reflects the (potential) changing fortunes of the two parties since the last general election.

Concluding Remarks

I guess, not surprisingly, we are also predicting a hund parliament, with the Conservatives having a slight lead over Labour. If our predictions are accurate, a coalition with the SNP would give a combined total of 325 seats – not quite the 326 needed to give an overall majority. Now that would be interesting!