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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

‘The next election will be a choice between a coalition government … or a stable Conservative majority government’

Fewer respondents than four years ago are completely comfortable with the prospect of a Conservative majority government—34% in 2007, 26% in 2011. If you combine the currently comfortable with the slightly comfortable and the uncomfortable with slightly uncomfortable, you get a tie—48% to 47.9%.

The mathematics of majority

I think this is quite the most fascinating thing I’ve come across for a long time. It was brought to my attention by a reader of the Small Dead Animals blog, where a blogger named Marcus Vitruvius (proprietor of the Sagacious Iconoclast) sometimes guest-posts. It’s called Vitruvius’s Experimental Election Predictor, and offers a quick and dirty way of reckoning whether the Tories are likely to win a majority.

The formula is as follows:

Ve=(CL)*(C+L)/100