Publications by Daniel Marcelino

Yep. He made it; country voted No.

19.09.2014

Yesterday, more Scots than ever since universal suffrage was introduced cast a ballot on the matter of independence. The turnout was itself phenomenal and that implicating a series of questions for the government authorities and citizens, but for the time being the sole question was: would this benefit one side or the other? The verdict favored t...

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Brazilian Presidential Election

25.09.2014

Three major polling houses published their polls this week: MDA, Ibope, and Vox Populi. The following numbers incorporate these data. With current data, a runoff between Dilma and Marina seems to be inevitable (.87), though its certainty has decreased from the previous week as the following chart indicates. How to understand the following plots:...

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A majority victory is not that impossible

29.09.2014

By this time next week, we’ll already know the true vote intentions of Brazilians towards the candidates running for president. Not long time ago a runoff was taken as grant, but last polls have been converging on the feeling that Brazilians are about to reward the Workers’ Party’s government another term. Marina Silva (PSB), who became the...

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Got a ticket for the runoff?

01.10.2014

This is one of the very last posting before the election next Sunday. So far, the only certainty is the runoff ticket of the incumbent candidate, Dilma Rousseff (PT). The runner up candidates, the environmentalist Marina Silva (PSB) and the Social Democrat Aecio Neves are walking to a neck-and-neck dispute over the last spin. Although polling hou...

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A bit more fragmented

06.10.2014

Tweet This year election renders an even more fragmented legislative. The way political scientists measure this is by applying an algorithm to calculate the Effective Number of Parties, which is a measure that helps to go beyond the simple number of parties. A widely accepted algorithm was proposed by M. Laakso and R. Taagepera: , where N denotes...

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Simple Probs

24.10.2014

Somebody said me that it’d be really nice to see a posting with simple simulations for the runoff this weekend. Answering such a call, this is the best I could come up with. The following is a highly simplified simulation that does not account for time trends nor for house effects. But it’s still theoretically sound as it takes a vector of p...

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What are the chances of Dilma tomorrow?

25.10.2014

Although polling data are the most common source in an electoral campaign, there are also models that use prediction markets data (trade contracts flow) as the source of information about who is going to win the election. What is the best way of predicting an election is up to debate, but models based on the wisdom of crowds have been used extens...

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Brazilian latest polls and house effects

25.10.2014

The latest polls just released tonight are suggesting a numerical tie between Dilma Rousseff (PT) and Aecio Neves (PSDB) considering the limit of the margin of error. Actually, these polls fired up a possible game-changing for the opposition over the government as some of the polls did capture any impact stimulated by the televised debate on Frid...

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Runoff in Uruguay: FA is expected to win a third mandate

14.11.2014

Within 2 weeks, electors in Uruguay will vote for the runoff election between FA and PN. According to the polling data being published, it’s very likely Uruguayans will give FA a third mandate. I run the following forecast model which suggest that the difference between the two parties are huge; even greater than the number of undecided voters....

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Frente Amplio Winnability

14.11.2014

Uruguayan voters are about to give give Frente Amplio a third mandate this November 30th. The following graph shows how the outcome would look like if the election were held this week. The undecided voters were distributed accordingly to each party as by the election day. The picture draws the pdf’s for FA and PN vote support as published by 6 ...

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