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Estimating coalition majorities during political campaigns based on pre-election polls

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-02-26, 11:43 authored by Lukas F. Stoetzer, Matthias Orlowski

In multi-party systems, politicians, voters, and political pundits often speculate about potential coalition governments based on current poll results. Their interest particularly centers around the question whether a specific coalition has enough public support to form a parliamentary majority. In this research note, we present a Bayesian Dynamic Multinomial-Dirichlet model to estimate the probability that a coalition will find enough public support to form a parliamentary majority. An application to German federal elections from 1994–2017 and comparisons with alternative methods underscore the value of this approach.

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