Above are the predictions for next week’s UK parliamentary election by fivethirtyeight.com, in collaboration with The Guardian. The Guardian doesn’t expect a radical shift from these numbers and the big question is whether the Conservatives will get a majority of seats.

The methodology behind the predictions is being challenged by psephologists adhering to the uniform swing hypothesis, in what Nate Silver calls a nerdfight. The uniform swing hypothesis states that if a party finishes x points behind their standing in the previous election, their share of the vote will decline by x points in each constituency.

“The uniform swing has its proponents, and it has the virtue of being fairly easy to calculate. But, most recent elections in the United Kingdom have not been all that dramatic, with fairly minor shifts in the vote between Labour and Conservatives. The last time that there was something resembling a ‘wave’ election — in 1997 when Labour, under Tony Blair, leaped forward from 34 percent of the vote to 43 — the uniform swing would have underestimated their gains by about 25 seats, and underestimated Conservatives’ losses by 40. And that election did not feature — as this one does — a third party like the Liberal Democrats who were polling right in line with, and often ahead of, the other two.” [*]

Nate does a good job of responding to a critique of his methodology and explaining how uniform swing is still a hypothesis. I like the granularity of the fivethirtyeight.com methodology and agree with Silver’s assertion that not all constituencies will respond uniformly to the political zeitgeist. I’ve explored second choices and the use of social network analysis in order to get a better sense of where the political zeitgeist is and I’m wondering how this could add more fine-tuning to prediction models.

Song:: Billy Bragg-‘Waiting for a Great Leap Forward’

Twitterversion:: New fivethirtyeight / Guardian election seat predictions for UK elections & “nerdfight” over uniform swing. @Prof_K