Jean-François Godbout, a Université de Montréal political scientist, and his colleague Éric Bélanger, a McGill University political scientist, have a guest post over at The Monkey Cage in which they discuss their forecast of the Canadian election:
“Our model thus predicts that a minority government will again be elected by Canadians this coming May. To put things in context, the Conservative government currently holds 143 of the 308 seats, while the Liberals have 77, the NDP 36, and the Bloc Québécois 47 (there are also two vacant seats and one independent MP). If we consider the model’s margin of error of 4%, we predict a Conservative minority government with 30-38% of the vote and 33-41 percent of the seats, which would mean a 5 percentage point decline for the Conservatives in seat numbers assuming the upper bound of our prediction.”
In other words, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… I have a good deal of faith in this forecast given that I have known JF — and admired his intelligence — since we were in college together, and I know that he does careful empirical work.
Thanks for the kind words Mark. After seeing the debates last night, I don’t think much is going to change in terms of vote intentions. However, I still think that the Conservative party is going to finish with the most seats, more than what we predict in our model.
We started with this forecasting tool in the 2000 election. Back then, minority governments were not really part of the equation. We haven’t changed anything since then. So we are more or less stuck with what we have, although historically our model performs relatively well.
The bottom line, Conservative minority government part trois….
Good to hear from you, JF. Thanks for comment further here in the comments. We miss you at Duke.