France 2nd round polls, April 30th update

Eight pollsters now (Ifop, LH2, Harris, Ipsos, BVA, CSA, Harris, TNS Sofres). Source: Sondages en France. Since January 15th. Last polls: Ipsos and LH2 (fieldwork completed on the 28th):

France, 2nd round polls, April 27th update

The last (official) Greek polls

Here. The extreme values, rounded:

ND 22-25.5%
PASOK 17-19%
Syriza 9-11%
KKE 9-11%
Independent Greeks 8-10%
Democratic Left 5-9%
Golden Dawn 4-5%
LAOS 3-4%
Ecogreens 3-4%
Democratic Alliance 3-4%
Drazi 1-2%

Lots of undecided too (20% or above). Election day is May 6th.

French 2nd round polls

A quick look at the French 2nd round polls. Data taken from Sondages en France, 2nd round voting intentions for Hollande, six pollsters (Ifop, Ipsos, Opinion-Way, Harris, BVA, CSA), 63 polls total since January 22nd. I show two Lowess lines, one more sensitive than the other. Vertical lines are the 1st and 2nd round election dates. It takes a lot of zooming to get any inkling of change, but there it is: Hollande declining until early April, no clear evidence of change ever since, certainly too early to detect any post-1st round changes.

The polls in France

The last French polls did well, by comparative standards at least. In 2007, no pollster managed to estimate the vote for the first four candidates with an average absolute error below 2 points. In some cases, like in the CSA last poll, things were even worse, with Sarkozy's vote underestimated by almost 6 points and Le Pen's vote overestimated by more than 6 points. Things went better this time: Hollande and Sarkozy did slightly better than expected, and the major problems came with Le Pen and Mélenchon doing, respectively, better and worse that what the polls were suggesting, but still with deviations that were not so large as the ones that occurred in 2007.

A pollster-by-pollster look suggests that, in most cases, whatever may have been behind the over- or under-estimation of candidates' results was common to all pollsters: Le Pen was consistently underestimated, Mélenchon was consistently overestimated and, with few exceptions, the underestimation of both Hollande and Sarko were also common (and relatively small).

Things continue to look bleak for Sarkozy. In 2007, for the 2nd round results, Sarkozy got a majority of the votes in almost every single poll published since the beginning of the year:

Now, Sarkozy faces the exact opposite situation: he has been behind Hollande in every single poll published since at least February, and the polls conducted yesterday place him behind Hollande at least 6 points.

Eurosondagem, 11-17 Abril, N=1036, Tel.

PSD: 35.3% (-0.7%)
PS: 30.5% (0.9%)
CDS-PP: 10.7% (-1.3%)
CDU: 9.1% (+0.6%)
BE: 6.4% (-0.5%)

Aqui. Para a jornalista Cristina Figueiredo, do Expresso, mudanças abaixo de um ponto percentual numa sondagem significam "Passos e Governo caem, Seguro e PS sobem." Realmente, gastar massa numa sondagem para depois vir dizer que está tudo exactamente na mesma é chato.

Portugal, abreviado

"Imagine que tem um problema na canalização da sua casa. Chama um técnico que lhe diz que terá de pagar 100€ pelo arranjo. Se quiser factura, serão 123€. Pedia ou não factura?

Pedia: 31%
Não pedia: 64%
Ns/Nr: 5%"

Aqui.

French forecasting models

The April issue of French Politics (ungated) is dedicated to several fun articles forecasting the 2012 French elections. Nadeau, Lewis-Beck, and Bélanger, using simultaneous equations to deal, in the one hand, with the relationship between incumbent popularity and vote for the leftist candidates in the first round and, on the other hand, the relationship between unemployment, time in office, cohabitation, and incumbent popularity, predict that the Left will get a (narrow) majority of the votes in the first round. Nadeau and Lewis-Beck (again) and Didier then take a look at second-round vote as a function of presidential approval measured 4 months before the election and the image of the candidates, and suggest that Sarkozy is in rather bad shape for the second round, albeit not so bad as polls were suggesting a few months ago. Foucault focuses on legislative elections, using local data on unemployment, national GDP data, PM's popularity, local data again on previous electoral performance of the incumbent, and a couple of other specificities, and concludes that the Left will have a narrow majority of the votes (in the last issue of PS, Foucault and Nadeau also use local data, which is then aggregated and weighted to arrive at a prediction of a - narrow - Sarkozy defeat).  Evans and Ivaldi predict Marine Le Pen with around 17%. But Jerôme and Jerôme-Speziari, using regional data, actually give a very close advantage to Sarkozy. As one of the papers notes, "a victory in 2012 would certainly qualify Sarkozy as one of the most successful campaigners in modern times." I guess at least that is safe to say.

Political consequences of the economic crisis: voting and protesting in Europe since 2008

This is the title of a conference jointly organized by the Department of Government and the BMW Center for German and European studies of Georgetown University. April 17th (from 9.30am to 3.00pm) and 18th (10.00am to 5.30pm) at the Edward B. Bunn Intercultural Center, 7th Floor Conference Room.

Participants, by order of presentation:

Indridi Indridason (U California Riverside)
Michael Marsh (Trinity, Dublin)
Pedro Magalhães (U Lisbon and Georgetown U)
Mariano Torcal (Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Eftichia Teperoglou (MZES, Mannheim and CIES-ISCTE, Lisbon)
Emmanouil Tsatsanis (U Athens and CIES-ISCTE, Lisbon)
Paolo Bellucci (U Siena)
António Costa Pinto (U Lisbon)
David S. Muir (Director of Political Strategy for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, 2008-2011)
Josep Colomer (Georgetown U)
Nuno Mota Pinto (World Bank)
Pedro Gete (Georgetown U)
John Karamichas (Queen’s U, Belfast)
Pedro Ramos Pinto (U Manchester)
Irene Martín (U Autónoma Madrid)
Harold Clarke (U T Dallas)
Raymond Duch (Oxford U)

Closing the morning session on the 18th, we'll have Ambassador Nuno Brito, Ambassador of Portugal in the USA. Closing the afternoon session, we'll have Minister Antonio de Lecea, Principal Advisor on Economic and Financial Affairs at the EU Delegation in the USA.

Full programme here. Kind support from the Luso-American Development Foundation and from the Endesa Foundation.

And here's the paper I'll be presenting on the 2011 Portuguese elections. Comments very welcome.

Bleeding stopped?

Added two new polls to the graph, Eurosondagem and Marktest. PSD seems pretty stable in the last three polls. But it's just three polls...