During the 2015 election, the Government Department created LSE’s General Election blog, which drew on the contributions of hundreds of authors in LSE and outside to provide focused coverage of the election itself (going far beyond the coverage capabilities of the British Politics and Policy blog) and also incorporating many contributions from our sister blogs, including commentary at the Democratic Audit and the statistical background to the general election at Democratic Dashboard. The General Election site was always intended to be temporary, and so we ceased coverage a month after the election finished.
However, all the content now forms part of our long-run and permanently archived heritage here on the British Politics and Policy blog, reflecting LSE Government Department’s commitment to building free and open access resources available to scholars and citizens long term.
We sincerely thank all of the many authors who contributed here, and all the scholars, practitioners, citizens and followers who commented and created a great debate around the blog during the campaign period.
Update News: Thanks to funding from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and LSE’s HEIF5 fund, the Democratic Dashboard will be covering all the UK’s major elections in May 2016, and refreshing our General Election 2015 constituency archive, so as to be ready for the 2020 general election.
General Election 2015 blog posts
[blog number_posts=”10″ scrolling=”infinite” cat_slug=”general-election-2015-blog-content”][/blog]
Thanks for reading!
As the election is over, we will no longer be publishing new posts on this site. Please visit our sister blog, the LSE's British Politics and Policy ...more
Party leader satisfaction ratings and election outcomes
In this post, Ruth Dixon argues that, in future elections, measures of party leader satisfaction are worth looking at in more detail, as standard voting ...more
If not polls, then betting markets?
In this post, Chris Hanretty, Ben Lauderdale and Nick Vivyan investigate the predictive performance of the betting markets relative to their electionforecast.co.uk forecasting model. The failure of the ...more
The new "skew" of the electoral system in 2015
Historically, the electoral system has tended to help Labour in the way it translates votes into seats. In 2015, the skew changed, giving a significant advantage to ...more
Why the pre-election polls get it so wrong: Is it time to take probability sampling seriously?
Many of the lessons from the polling debacle of 1992 have been learned, but it may be time to address the underlying causes of the error ...more
Did Britain’s right-wing newspapers win the election for the Tories?
In the 2015 election campaign, almost all newspapers were extremely pro-Conservative and rabidly anti-Labour. Bart Cammaerts writes that if almost all media are so enthusiastically choosing ...more
The 'shy' English nationalists who won it for the Tories and flummoxed the pollsters
Most newspapers concluded that the Tories mainly won over Lib Dem and Labour waverers to score a surprising majority in the general election. However, as Eric ...more
Can the Union survive the election?
Not only could federalism work for Britain, it may be the only constitutional system which can now hold the country together. The real obstacle is that such ...more
Labour must go back to conviction politics
In many respects, Labour needed this crushing electoral defeat to rebrand and re-position, writes Ranj Alaaldin. The absence of a strong narrative of conviction from Labour ...more
Three more years of Cameron – but it will be a rocky road ahead
Confounding the pollsters and the pundits, voters in England have given David Cameron another three years as Prime Minister, collapsed the Liberal Democrats to a shell ...more
