Polls

Here I study the Dutch polls. The last elections took place on 22 November 2023. PvdA and GL decided to enter the elections with a common list, and popular former CDA MP Pieter Omtzigt will enter them as well with his new NSC party.

Politics homepage.

If you’re looking for officially quotable, pol-sci-validated numbers, go to the Peilingwijzer instead. This page has nicer graphs, though.

Pollster comparison. Who’s best?

European Parliament.

My average

My weighted average of the polls is designed to flatten out trends, so that outliers are somewhat ignored, and only persistent trends accepted. It reports a shift of seats relative to current parliament.

My average of the polls
Party 2021 Senate Party

The effective number of parties is a measure for the fragmentation of a party system. The highest effective number ever reached in actual elections was 8.5 in 2021.

Parties

See the party profiles for a description of most parties. Below are the ones I never wrote a party profile for.

NSC (Nieuw Sociaal Contract; translation is obvious) is the new party of popular former CDA MP Pieter Omtzigt. This party will be hard to poll because Omtzigt will likely not participate in the entire country, but only in about one third (population-wise). It's likely the pollsters will initially just treat him as a national party, but later show the party only to people who actually live in the area in which it participates. Thus the seat count will likely rise first, and then drop. Omtzigt himself aims for about 10 seats.
Incidentally, Omtzigt’s key areas where he’ll likely participate are also the BBB’s key areas.

BBB (Boer Burger Beweging; Farmer Citizen Movement, the alliteration works in Dutch) is a farmers’s party. It won the 2023 provincial elections, but whether that will translate to success in the national ones remains to be seen.

JA21 (not sure what it means; Ja is Yes) is a party of FvD dissidents Joost Eerdmans and Annabel Nanninga. It positions itself as a reasonable radical-right party.

Volt is a pan-European party that occupies a D66-like position on the political spectrum.

BIJ1 (Bijeen means something like together; it also refers to article 1, the constitutional article concerned with equality before the law). Founded by Sylvana Simons, a black TV personality, angling for the black vote while also taking radical left stances. Simons’s resignation after a series of internal disputes puts the party at risk of disappearing.

The OSF (Onafhankelijke Senaatsfractie; Independent Senate fraction) is an amalgam of regional parties that will not enter the national elections.

BVNL is an FvD split-off headed by Van Haga, who was on the FvD list in 2021 and got nearly as many votes as party leader Baudet. He split off shortly after the elections.

Current polls

Here’s an overview of the latest poll by each pollster.

Current poll overview
Pollster Date Weight Bullish Bearish New parties
I&O Research
()
Ipsos Politieke Barometer
()
Peil.nl
()

The Weight value gives the relative weight of the poll in the calculation of the Now column above. However, the Now column also uses older polls that fall before the second column’s date, so the average isn’t dependent on these last polls alone.

The Bullish and Bearish columns show:

Poll timeline

Coalitions

coalition relations:

Preferred partners
Possible partners
Unlikely or unwilling partners
Excluded parties

The most negative opinion prevails. So if the SP indicates it can work with the VVD, but the VVD says it can’t work with the SP, their relation is Excluded.

The coalition tables are automatically generated and may sometimes show weird coalitions. Still, Dutch politics are in such a state of advanced chaos that even weird coalitions may come to look appealing.

Coalitions with at least a % likelihood according to
Coalition Type Likelihood Polls ch 2021 Senate

A five- or even a six-party coalition is not as remote as it might seem. Not all parties have to send ministers to the cabinet — they can support government from parliament, like Wilders supported Rutte I (VVD+CDA). The left-wing equivalent would be a PvdA+D66+GL government.

Such a minority government would have to come to agreements with other parties that promise to support it. This combination of government parties and supporting parties is likely to be one of the coalitions mentioned here.

Source
Coalition Type Likelihood Polls ch 2021 Senate

I add the likelihood of all coalitions that a party participates in to get at its likelihood to be in government. I do the same for all coalition types and sizes.

Coalition chances
Coalition type
Coalition size
Prime minister

Raw data

Election 2021-election 2023 data are here.

Election 2017-election 2021 data are here.
2016-election 2017 data are here.
2011-2015 data are here.

I started collecting these data in June 2011. I do not know of any comprehensive source for poll data before June 2011.

There are three pollsters in Dutch politics: Ipsos Politieke Barometer, Peil.nl, and I&O Research. Sometimes NIPO/Kantar also releases polls, but they do not believe in reliable timing.

Ipsos and I&O are going to merge. That means that we’ll have only two pollsters left. I hope a new one will enter the market; two seems too little.

Here’s the raw JSON data; below are some nice tables.

Ipsos Politieke Barometer

Ipsos tends to publish its Politieke Barometer poll on the last Tuesday of the month. It is featured in the Eén Vandaag TV programme.

Prior to 2021 it was clearly the best Dutch pollster, but nowadays that is becoming more questionable. It tends to have better results for the right block and the traditional catch-all parties.

Last Ipsos / Eén Vandaag polls
Party 2021 Party

Peil.nl

Peil.nl used to publish its poll every week on Sunday, but now skips many Sundays.

Peil.nl is always out for sensational headlines. Protest parties SP and PVV usually poll better with Peil.nl than with the other two, and the same goes for the left block and for small parties.

Maurice de Hond is Peil.nl’s owner and a well-known political commentator in his own right.

Last Peil.nl polls
Party 2021 Party

I&O Research

I&O Research publishes a poll each month around the 15th. Their polls tend to over-estimate the left a bit.

Last I&O Research polls
Party 2021 Party

Historical overview

Some old election results because they're fun.

Additional research

Sometimes I give an extra graph from a recent bit of research I like.

Calculations

I calculate my average and the coalitions as follows.

Polls

I treat the polls as follows:

  1. I established weighting factors for the pollsters based on past performance. They are
  2. I also use a decay factor based on the poll’s age. This is an exponential decay function with N0 of 1, t in days, and λ of .
  3. The polls are sorted according to the periods defined in the first table ( days).
  4. For each period I take the polls of one pollster, multiply the individual party scores by the decay factor, and put them in a bucket by party.
  5. I use the combined scores as votes in an election, which yields a average pollster score for this period.
  6. Once I’ve done so for all pollsters I multiply the average pollster scores by the pollster weight and the decay factor of the most recent poll and put them in a bucket.
  7. I again use the combined scores as votes in an election, which now yields my final average.
  8. Election: this is an election according to the normal rules.
    In order to protect the small parties I use the system of highest remainders for rest seats, and I have no electoral threshold.

Coalitions

The script creates all possible coalitions and then rejects the following ones:

  1. Coalitions with PvdA, CDA, and VVD.
  2. Coalitions with fewer than seats.
  3. Coalitions of which a subset already has seats.
  4. Coalitions with parties that have excluded each other. (See sidebar for the current exclusion list.)
  5. Coalitions with two or more parties that have fewer than seats.
  6. Coalitions whose smallest party has fewer than seats, unless that party gives the coalition its majority in either parliament or senate.

The table shows the remaining coalitions.

Coalition likelihood

The likelihood of a coalition is calculated by the following formula that I tweaked by hand (there are few theoretical underpinnings here). I don’t doubt I’ll make frequent changes.

The formula is
1/SIZE * MAJORITY * SMALLEST * RELATION * SENATE

SIZE
the number of parties in the coalition
MAJORITY
the majority of the coalition (seats over 75)
SMALLEST
the size of the smallest party
RELATION
Each pair of parties has a relation from 0 (excluded) to 3 (preferred). The sidebar shows which parties have which relations.
The variable is the sum of the worst relations in the coalition.
(Coalitions in which any two parties have relation 0 are rejected automatically, so that value doesn’t occur.)
SENATE
Is 1 if the coalition has a majority in the senate, if it does not.
PVV
Is when a coalition contains CDA+PVV or VVD+PVV.
Otherwise it is 1.

Once the likelihood of all coalitions has been calculated, the results are treated as votes in an election for 100 seats. This yields the percentages that are shown in the table.