Polls and coalition tool

Here I follow the election polls, and I also offer you the possibility to create your own coalition and find out why it’ll take so bloody long before we have a new government.

Scoreboard

The poll trends. I’ve dampened all polls, so that random fluctuations are not reported, only true trends (at least, I hope so).

The Senate has 75 seats; 38 are needed for a majority. CDA and SP are overrepresented relative to the polls, the PVV and to a lesser extent D66 are underrepresented. (The 75th Senate seat is for a motley coalition of regional parties and Greens.)

I treat the polls as follows:

1. I have established weighting factors for the pollsters based on past performance. They are
2. Per poll I multiply the number of seats for each party by the pollster’s weighting.
3. I add the party scores of all relevant polls.
4. Then I treat the result as votes in an election according to the normal rules, except that I use the system of highest remainders instead of highest averages for rest seats. This is done to protect the small parties.
5. The result of this election is shown in the table.

• The current polling numbers use the last polls.
• The short-term trend uses the polls from 1 to weeks back.
• The long-term trend uses the polls from to weeks back.

Poll data

The Politieke Barometer publishes its weekly poll on Thursday.

Peil.nl publishes its weekly poll on Wednesday or Thursday.

TNS NIPO publishes its weekly poll on Wednesday.

Poll overview

Here are the last few weeks’ worth of polls as a table and as a graph.

Coalitions

Here’s a whole slew of coalition for your perusing pleasure. They are not equally likely; I especially think that any coalition with the PVV, with both D66 and CU, or with both SP and VVD, is pretty unlikely — and maybe even PvdA and CDA will refuse to cooperate after the strain that came with the fall of Balkenende IV.

Nonetheless, political strategists have to keep all these options in mind, in case the election results are very difficult to interpret.

Greyed-out coalitions either don’t have a majority, or a subset of them already has a majority of at least seats. (For instance, if PvdA+VVD+D66 already has such a majority the parties will not invite GL to reinforce the coalition, and thus PvdA+VVD+D66+GL is not important any more.)

Game

Create your own coalition! (And find out why it takes so bloody long.)

Rules

1. Check the parties of your choice. The purpose is to create a coalition with more than 75 seats (average of polls) and with enough stability.
2. The more parties, the less stable the coalition. There are 20 stability points in total, and a government needs at least 1 of those points to survive. Still, a government with stability 1 will likely fall pretty quickly, so a higher stability score is advisable.
3. Ideally, each party wants to sit in a government that contains at least one of its electoral competitors, that does not contain any of its enemies, and that does not contain a party with diametrically opposing economic views.
4. Some parties have excluded each other. If you check one of them, the excluded parties will disappear.
5. Of the three large parties CDA, PvdA, and VVD, only two may sit in government. If you check two, the third will disappear.
6. Parties will also disappear if their inclusion in the coalition would drop the stability score to 0 or below.