Bayesian Search Theory in the Hunt for the USS Central America

 Posted on September 3, 2024  |  17 minutes  |  3453 words  |  

There is a 1992 paper by Lawrence Stone there that reads like it’s out of an adventure novel. It involves a steamer out on a stormy sea, missing gold, a group of scientists doing tons of sciency things, some truly awesome statistics and a legal saga. Mostly, this post is me trying to reconstruct the guts of that paper to make myself better understand Bayesian search theory, but there’s no reason we can’t take a few fun tangents along the way. [Read More]

Finding Demographic (and other) Relationships with Local Council Election Data

 Posted on July 28, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  937 words  |  

Intro Local elections paired with a relatively recent census present a unique opportunity to test the impact of locality-level predictors like quirks of demography on party support. This is because while in a general election, the most granular level of data released publicly is an electoral district, which is circa 30,000 voters, local council elections provide information on town populations from a few hundred to a few thousand voters. We can use other data sources to collate demographic and environmental variables on these towns, and see if and how each varies with voting behavior. [Read More]

MEP2024 Polling

 Posted on June 15, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  835 words  |  

How off were the polls this time round? The dust hadn’t even settled on Sunday evening, and prognosticators already started debriefing the apparent “polling miss”, all seemingly settling on the vote of the “undecideds” as being the cause. But let’s take a step back and see just how far off they were in the first place. I collected public polling published in the last 2 months. The solid line is 1st count party vote share for the MEP elections: often the thing polls are implicitly asking. [Read More]

Parliament's Composition Under Different Electoral Systems: a Defense of Malta's STV5

 Posted on April 20, 2024  |  13 minutes  |  2603 words  |  

Intro Our electoral system has been facing a relentless slow drip of criticism percolating through the years (1, 2, 3) in an attempt to suggest that it is lackluster and needs updating. The arguments against STV5 in its current form, when reduced to their gist, are, that it props up the current two party system and that districts are more trouble than they’re worth. These criticisms are devoid of historical awareness when Malta had no issue electing multiple parties using the current system, and global awareness, where Ireland has no issue electing non-party affiliated independents to the Dáil Éireann. [Read More]

Creating a European Parliament Forecast

 Posted on April 3, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1252 words  |  

Intro Elections for the European Parliament will take place in 27 countries from June 6th to 9th. Besides the fact that there are few EP specific polls out there, forecasting this election is more difficult than usual because it is 27 mini elections, each with slightly different rules. There are a few sophisticated models out there that estimate share from historical performance and polling like this one from ECFR. [Read More]

Locality Level Population Pyramids

 Posted on March 11, 2023  |  28 minutes  |  5919 words  |  

This is a companion post for a reactive shiny app that lives here. The NSO released the first part of their final report on the census a few weeks back, including fairly generous locality level data here. In this post, we’ll: construct an overall Malta and locality level population pyramids and wrap them in a shiny app for quick comparison. play with ways to quantitatively compare towns for ‘demographic similarity’. [Read More]

A Walk Down Electoral Calculus Memory Lane

 Posted on July 29, 2022  |  58 minutes  |  12314 words  |  

Electoral Calculus is a well respected UK based political consultancy that has been around for close to 30 years now. Headed by mathematician Martin Baxter, its main interface with the public is to predict UK elections. “Predicting” elections in the UK, just like the US, is a bit more complicated than polling the national sentiment like those of us in proportional representation countries are used to, since the lower houses of both countries elect members from winner take all districts. [Read More]

Campaign Spending

 Posted on May 28, 2022  |  5 minutes  |  973 words  |  

We got a look at candidates’s spend during the 2022 election this week. ToM even gave readers the option to download the raw data, which we can use for a deeper look into the issue, especially if we join with election day data (look at the appendix at the bottom for more info on this). What’s the range of Campaign Spending? Most candidates spent around 7,000 euros. Some however spent markedly less, and a handful spent upwards of 20,000 euros (median was 4,200). [Read More]

How far is the nearest bus stop?

 Posted on April 21, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  718 words  |  

Access to public transportation is a relatively important affair, since it translates into the accessibility to healthcare for the elderly and directly ties into educational and work opportunities, especially for lower socioeconomic groups. Answering how well Malta is served is actually not that hard, given that you phrase the question along the lines of ‘how far is it to the nearest bus stop?’, ignoring things like frequency and routes. [Read More]

What the heck was that election

 Posted on April 8, 2022  |  15 minutes  |  3172 words  |  

This post will feature a general rant before diving into these topics: District Trends Polling Error Shift of Electoral Support Did the Gender Quota misfire? Small Parties/independents in this election vs. others How do Chits and sampling help the parties call the election? Rant Before the Graphs That was a weird election, and not so much in the overall result. [Read More]