Category Archives: 2024 General Election

How energy and economic crises cost the Conservatives the 2024 general election 

By Stephen Fisher, 5th July 2024

Yesterday was the tenth time since 1922 that voters in Britain kicked out a government after an economic crisis. 

What was truly extraordinary is that since the 2019 election the Conservatives twice changed prime minister in an attempt to rescue themselves, each after an economic crisis, and then Rishi Sunak presided over a third economic crisis.

Governments tend to win elections, except after economic crises. That tendency now accounts for 20 of the last 28 elections. In a further three elections the government rescued themselves by changing prime minister after a crisis (dropping Lloyd George in 1922, dropping Eden after Suez, and dropping Thatcher after the 1990 recession). So, a combination of economic crises and political changes at the top can account for who governed after 23 of the last 28 elections, including all the elections since 1987. 

Yesterday’s election result fits a theory of UK elections I developed in this paper and summarised in this bloglast year, in which an economic crisis is defined to be a recession or a devaluation from a fixed exchange rate. The table below shows how all 28 elections since 1922 fit that pattern, or not. The blog discusses how the exceptions are either near misses of exceptional short-parliaments.

Table: Economic crises, post-crisis political changes of PM and government electoral fortunes since 1922

 Post-Crisis Political Change of PMGovernment wonGovernment lostTotal
No economic crisisNo10(1935, 1955, 1966, Oct 1974, 1987, 2001, 2005, 2015, 2017, 2019)3(1923, 1924, 1951) 13
     
     
Economic crisis since the last electionNo2(1950, 1983)10(1929, 1931, 1945, 1964, 1970, Feb 1974, 1979, 1997, 2010, 2024)12
     
 Yes3(1922, 1959, 1992)03
     
Total 151328 

Even though there have been post-crisis political changes of PM since 2019, the 2024 election is not listed in the bottom row because there was a recession (in 2023) after Sunak took office.

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Sixth and final combined forecast for the 2024 general election

By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny, Paul Furey, and Polina Ryzhuk. 3rd July 2024.

10am, 4th July. Updated to correct a minor typo. Forecasts published since the post below was published late last night but before polling stations opened this morning (and any we missed) will be incorporated in the evaluation after the results. So far it looks like those additions would make little difference to the tables below. Thanks to all the forecasters for their contributions.

The average of different kinds of seats forecasts points to a Labour majority of 194 in tomorrow’s general election. Changes since last week are: Conservative +8, Labour -3, LD +4, Reform +1, SNP -2, and no change for the Greens and PC. Those changes are partly due to moves in the betting markets, perhaps in response to polls that improved for the Conservatives, and new complex models (listed in the sources section below). However, MRP projections have worsened for the Conservatives. They are now forecasting an average of just 85 seats for the party.

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ELECTION POLLS VERSUS THE UK ECONOMY: CONSERVATIVES WON’T CLOSE THE GAP

Guest post by, John Kenny, University of East Anglia, and Michael S. Lewis-Beck, University of Iowa, 3rd July 2024.

            The snap election for the UK general election takes place tomorrow, with the vote intention polls, as aggregated by the BBC Poll Tracker, showing Labour with an 18 percentage point lead over the Conservatives. This gap indicates a serious Conservative loss. But are these vote intention data that accurate? The question seems worth asking, especially in the context of public opinion polling uncertainties surrounding this, and other previous, snap elections. (See the recent comprehensive review by Stegmaier, Jokinsky, and Lewis-Beck, 2023). An alternative to the vote intention approach to forecasting elections involves the use of structural models, in particular political economy models, which rest on the idea that political and economic fundamentals shape election outcomes. One such model, rolled out in 2001, forecast in advance of the contest the victory of the Labour party in that year (see Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, and Bélanger, 2004).  

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The Party Leadership Model predicts a Labour Overall Majority

Guest post by Andreas Murr, CIDE and University of Warwick. 1 July 2024

Voters will choose the next British prime minister this Thursday 4th July 2024.  The political parties narrowed down this choice much earlier.  The Labour party chose Keir Starmer as their leader on 4 April 2020; the Conservative party chose Rishi Sunak as their leader on 24 October 2022.  One of them will be the next prime minister.  Does their selection as party leaders tell us anything about who will be selected as prime minister?

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Fifth combined forecast for the 2024 general election

By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny, Paul Furey, and Polina Ryzhuk. 26th June 2024.

The average of different kinds of seats forecasts points to a Labour majority of 200; the same as last week. There is very little change for other parties, except that the average forecast for the Conservatives is down from 127 last week to 123 this week. That is despite a rise for the Tories in the simple-model projections (uniform change from opinion polls). The Conservative seat forecast is down in both the non-MRP complex models and the MRP average, which is now forecasting just 92 seats for the Conservatives. That average is now based on 9 different MRP models.

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Fourth combined forecast for the 2024 general election

By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny, Paul Furey, and Polina Ryzhuk. 19th June 2024.

All the different sources still point to a large Labour majority. On average across the different kinds of forecast, the predicted majority is, at 200, up eight from last week. The combined forecast for the Conservatives is down by nine seats, and that for the Liberal Democrats is up by seven seats since last week. Those changes have been largely driven by changes in MRP projections, but other sources have also typically changed in the same direction.

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Third combined forecast for the 2024 general election

By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny, Paul Furey, and Polina Ryzhuk. 12th June 2024.

All the different sources of seat forecasts still point to a large Labour majority. On average across the different kinds of forecast, the predicted majority is 192, down slightly from 197 last week. The Liberal Democrat forecast has crept up from 36 in our first forecast, to 37 last week, to 41 today. The betting markets are more optimistic for Reform UK winning seats than the poll-based models, as they were last week.

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Second combined forecast for the 2024 general election

By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny, Paul Furey, and Polina Ryzhuk. 6th June 2024.

All the different sources of seat forecasts still point to a large Labour majority. On average across the different kinds of forecast, the predicted majority is 197. That is up slightly from the 188 average majority in our first combined forecast this time last week.  

Table 1. Seat Forecasts

Betting MarketsComplex modelsSimple modelsMRPAverage
Con118144195114143
Lab424434392444424
LD4232284537
Reform30011
Green1111
SNP1916132418
PC3333
Lab majority199217134238197

The increase is largely due to the higher Labour forecasts from the MRP models, which are listed in Table 2. They are remarkably different from each other, ranging from a Labour majority of 114 to as much as 324. The forecast number of Conservative seats in the MRP projections range from 66 to 180. A key part of the differences between the MRP projections for the Conservatives and Labour is the degree to which the models expect party performance to be proportional to the prior Conservative vote share. By comparison, traditional uniform change models (under simple models in Table 1) produce more modest forecasts for Labour gains and Conservative losses.

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First combined forecast for the 2024 general election

By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny, Paul Furey, and Polina Ryzhuk. 30th May 2024.

Here we combine seats and vote share forecasts from a variety of sources including betting markets, polls, statistical forecasting models, and citizen forecasts. As well as updating weekly, incorporating new forecasts with different methods as they become available, there may be developments in the methodology. Comments welcome. 

All the different sources of seat forecasts in Table 1 point to a very large Labour majority, well over 100. 

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