Scottish polls…
As much as I love Scotland, or because of it, I would not dream of suggesting to Scots that one side of the referendum sounds better than the other. However, I am rather annoyed at the yoyo-like reactions to the successive polls about the result, because, just like during the US elections, each poll is analysed separately rather than being pooled with the earlier ones in a reasonable meta-analysis… Where is Nate Silver when we need him?!
Xi'an's Og 
October 12, 2020 at 4:13 am
[…] their outcome is given, rather than designing them in the first place). And starting with the Scottish independence referendum of 2014. The first chapter covering the cartoon case of simple sampling from a population, with or without […]
September 11, 2014 at 12:22 pm
Nate Silver seems to have written off the Scottish independence referendum in August last year when he is quoted as saying “There’s virtually no chance that the ‘yes’ side will win. If you look at the polls, it’s pretty definitive really where the no side is at 60-55% and the yes side is about 40 or so.”
http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/scottish-independence-no-chance-for-yes-silver-1-3042233
You can see the trend in the polls over the last 18months:
http://whatscotlandthinks.org/questions/should-scotland-be-an-independent-country-1#line
This is just the raw data with no attempt at smoothing.
September 11, 2014 at 12:32 pm
Thank you Martyn.
I do remember the interview of Nate Silver last year, however he does not seem to have followed the issue any further. At least I did not find a trace on his FiveThirtyEight website…
September 12, 2014 at 12:01 pm
They published something new just after you made this blog post:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/scotland-independence-referendum/
September 12, 2014 at 12:46 pm
Thanks, Dennis. I missed that one. Interesting that a significant part of the votes have already been cast. And too bad the data cannot be surveyed to predict the final outome! However, they do not seem aimed at reproducing the US electionmeta-analysis.