Politics academics all ignorant lefties

"I’m sceptical about much election forecasting...but I confidently acquit my colleagues of the charge of being groupthinking lefties."

Politicalbetting.com had some fun this week with the results of a poll of politics academics, carried out back in 2006, which showed the vast majority both wanted and expected a Labour victory after the general election. A full 54% of politics academics wanted a Labour victory, compared to just 15% who wanted a Conservative win. Ditto their predictions for what the Commons would look like after the election: 53% expected a Labour victory, just 18% thought a Conservative victory was likely. And an overwhelming 80% thought Gordon Brown was the best chancellor of the post-war era. Given both this overwhelming Labour bias, and what currently look like very inaccurate predictions, why should we believe the academic election forecasts reported here a few days ago?

The problem is that we’re not comparing like with like. Politics, as a discipline, is extremely broad, a point we make repeatedly to students wanting to study it at university. At Nottingham, for example, our third year students can take modules from a list of about 30, covering everything from intervention in Africa to war and massacre, from the politics of science fiction to Middle Eastern politics, and from political utopianism to Russian security policy, as well as modules looking at parliamentary politics or the politics of public opinion.

The much-ridiculed survey was of members of the Political Studies Association, a group which represents that broad church. The result is that when the PSA does surveys of its members on things like this it often gets silly results, which is why I wish they wouldn’t, and have argued before – in an article that didn’t win me any friends – that they make us all look pretty stupid.

But the recent political forecasts didn’t come from all politics academics; they came from a very specialised group of election experts. Plenty of these aren’t in the PSA anyway (many of those presenting papers at the Manchester conference are not even UK academics). So, in short, those who did the forecasting are not all PSA members, and not all PSA members are election experts. I wouldn’t necessarily trust this lot’s views on political philosophy (nor they mine), but I do trust their knowledge when it comes to elections.

As for political bias, well, there’s no doubt that academics are on the whole left-of-centre. I was once told that academics used to be much more representative of the rest of the population, until the public sector/private sector voting cleavage became so prominent in the 1980s, although I’ve seen no evidence of that. For what it’s worth, I suspect – although again with no evidence – that the elections experts are not as left-of-centre as academia in general. But more importantly, where’s the evidence that any bias, if it exists, has impacted on the various voting forecasts? Anyone who studies the papers presented at the recent conference – or any similar work – will see that these are pretty hard headed models, into which the data go, and out of which the results flow. It’s really not clear where the bias is supposed to be.

As the original post pointed out, I’m sceptical about much election forecasting (as is my colleague Cees van der Eijk, who wrote an excellent short article for the British Journal of Politics and International Relations setting out his doubts), but I confidently acquit my colleagues of the charge of being groupthinking lefties.

They might well still be wrong, but if they are, we will be able to judge their models against the result, and say why. And it won’t be because of any bias.

Professor Philip Cowley

Mystic Meg says: hung parliament

‘Prediction is very difficult’, said the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, ‘especially about the future’. But a recent academic conference at the University of Manchester tried to do exactly that with the forthcoming election. The conference was featured on the ever-excellent politicalbetting.com website, and what followed was a shower of abuse from readers of the site, many of whom didn’t like what they were reading. Much of this was ad hominem, much downright abusive, and much of the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) has since been removed from the site. One of the allegations was that the academics were engaged in an exercise in ‘groupthink’.

I’m personally quite sceptical about a lot of election forecasting. With the exception of David Sanders’ work on the economy and voting – which famously got the 1992 election right, when the polls and most commentators got it wrong -- I’m not convinced that it adds much value, beyond what you could get anyway from glancing at the opinion polls, and applying a uniform swing. Too often a massive amount of work goes into developing models that deliver little more than a series of SOTBOs (that is, Statements Of The Blindingly Obvious). And for much of the conference, I felt like a character in a Bateman cartoon: the man who was sceptical about election forecasting.

However, the one charge of which my colleagues are absolutely free is that of group think. The different papers presented at the conference came from a variety of different institutions, all working separately, using completely different methods and approaches, and drawing on different data. Some used measures of party support, others measures of prime ministerial/leaders approval. One paper forecasted using local council by-elections, another looked at the public’s expectations of the election. They then weighted and filtered these data in different ways.

And yet here’s the thing: despite working independently, almost every single paper forecast a hung parliament, one in which no party had an overall majority. They differed over which party would hold most seats (most papers predicted the Conservatives), but they almost all predicted than no party would have an overall majority. That’s not group think. That’s the sort of consensus that should make even those of us who are sceptical sit up and take notice. Of course, they could all be wrong, and we’ll know that in a month and a bit, but if so, they will be independently wrong.

And here’s another thing. As politicalbetting.com recognised a few days later, the betting markets – which are also sometimes used as a form of prediction, for those who believe in the wisdom of crowds – are now heading in the same direction.

Professor Philip Cowley