More Statistics…

I continue here the theme of the previous post, i.e., predictions on the Senate election outcome in Italy, based on pre-electoral polls, and statistical analysis of the data. In the last couple of days, a few regional polls had been finally published. I tried to incorporate the more recent ones in my model. As before, I start by giving the results, then add a few comments:

PdL	PD	SA	UDC	Others
159	141	9	5	1

The model is now an hybrid, using local polls for 9 regions (Piemonte, Lombardia, Veneto, Liguria, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicilia) and national polls for the others. In spite of having considered only recent polls, spanning the same period, the data are not uniform, in the sense that the 9 regions follow the general trend only approximately. In other words, the uniform national swing is not completely respected. In any case, I guess this is the best I can produce with the present data.

I invite you to have a look for a comparison at www.politiche08.org, a site that uses a very similar procedure, based on regional polls whenever available. Other predictions can be found (apart from noiseFromAmeriKa) also at The Right Nation, a right-wing Italian site and on the blog of Chris Hanretty, an English political scientists.

I repeat again the warning, the Senate electoral system is highly unpredictable, and several region are apparently an extremely close call. In some cases a couple of thousands votes can swing a few seats.

Just for fun, I put below another curiosity. It’s the plot of the correlation, for the model based on nation wide polls, between the PdL-PD vote gap and the projected number of seats in the Senate.

The nice thing is that there is no real correlation below 10%. Therefore, the distance between the two main competitors, in general taken as the main indicator to predict the outcome of the election, is irrelevant for the Senate race.

I’m sorry I never got proper training in chaos theory.

 

UPDATE March 31

In order to facilitate comparisons, I publish below a table with the Senate forecasts for PdL, split by Regions, made by the above mentioned sites during the last days. Please let me know if you spot any discrepancy/error in the Table.

Note1: I don’t have informations about Hanretty’s predictions split by regions - he predicts a total of 164 seats for PdL, though. I have taken the information directly from the corresponding sites for Right Nation (R. Nat.) and Politiche08 (Pol 08). For noiseFromAmeriKa (nfA) I derived the numbers myself using their published spreadsheet.

Note2: R. Nat. and nFA both use the polls superaverage published by R. NAt., while Pol ‘08 uses 2006 results integrated by all regional polls available. I have used an average of all nation wide polls made in March (Grav 1), integrated then by recent regional polls for 9 regions (Grav2).

Note3: R. Nat. attributes one likely seat for Sen. Pallaro from South-America to PdL, on the ground that in the past he declared he would vote for the majority. In the table I took it out from PdL to ease comparison with other sites.