Friday 6 May 2011

Opinion polls

For those interested in the Portuguese elections, I suggest you follow the opinion polls summary and analysis by Pedro Magalhães (in portuguese).

1 comment:

  1. The first thing that comes to mind is how statistically worthless the polls are. Let me explain: Portuguese members of parliament are elected from 22 electoral districts. Each district has their own demograpahic differences, for example some have more senior citizens, others have more young voters. Some districts like Alentejo favour the left, others like Leiria tend to favour the Social-Democrats, etc. In other words there are a lot of variables to consider that finally contribute the the electoral result. The problem I have with the polls conducted so far is that they do not take any of this into consideration, it's a simple up and down the country 500-1,000 person poll, moreover 30% of those polled are indecided??? So my question is, considering the before mentioned, what real conclusions can we take from the polls?

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