Two weeks before the 2012 Dutch parliamentary elections, the SP was still at 35 seats in the polls, but in the end, with 15 seats, the party did not even win half of the number of seats at the Binnenhof predicted by peil.nl. In contrast, the PvdA made a recovery in the last few weeks: having been predicted to win 18 seats, Diederik Samsom ended up taking 38 MPs into Parliament, making theirs the second-largest party in the Netherlands after the VVD.
(No one predicted that Brexit would actually happen. On the night before the American election, experts were still giving Donald Trump a 15% chance of winning, but the rest is history…)
What are the driving forces behind the predictive values of the opinion pollsters? Should we be calling them pollsters, or do the polls of public opinion have so much influence that we could actually call them opinion makers?
In a society where only 30% are loyal to a single party and populist thinking on both left and right sides of the political spectrum is riding high, it is becoming more and more difficult to predict what the electorate are thinking in the polling booth.
Nevertheless, we are going to take on that challenge anyway. At this hackathon, organised by The Analytics Lab and Cmotions, we will be focussing on the Dutch parliamentary elections. Who will follow in the footsteps of Emesa, who finished in first place the first time we undertook this fantastic event?! Sign up now for the hackathon on 10 March 2017, predict the election result and beat your colleagues and also the renowned opinion pollsters!
Due to the large number of registrations, we sadly cannot accept any more registrations for the hackathon. However, keep an eye on our website and newsletter because there will certainly be another one which we would be delighted for you to attend!
Update: you can also read an article on Consultancy.nl about our hackathon.
For more information, send an e-mail to info@theanalyticslab.nl or go to the website of The Analytics Lab.
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