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About the data

Methodology

“Pollytic aggregates and presents polling data published by third parties. Polls are estimates of public opinion and are not election results.”

Key terms

Poll
A survey of a sample of people, designed to estimate the views of a wider population at a point in time.
Voting intention
The share of respondents who say they would vote for each party if an election were held now, usually after excluding those who are undecided or would not vote.
Polling institute
The organisation that designed and conducted the poll. Pollytic always names the institute and links to its original publication.
Fieldwork
The period during which the institute collected responses. It usually ends a few days before the results are published.
Sample size
The number of people whose responses were used. Larger samples reduce, but do not eliminate, random error.
Percentage point (pp)
The arithmetic difference between two percentages. A party moving from 30% to 33% has gained 3 percentage points, not 10%.

How we collect and review polls

  1. Collection. Polls are entered by our editors or imported automatically from polling institutes’ published releases.
  2. Pending review. Automatically imported polls are never published straight away. They enter a review queue, flagged with anything that could not be read from the source (for example, missing fieldwork dates).
  3. Editor approval. An editor checks each figure against the original source before approving it. Possible duplicates of an existing poll are flagged rather than added.
  4. Publication with attribution. Published polls show the institute, publication date, fieldwork period, sample size and methodology, with a link to the original source that is never altered.

Automated tools may only record what the source literally states. Missing values are left blank and flagged for a person to check; they are never estimated.

Changes and trends

The change shown next to each figure compares a poll with the previous poll by the same institute for the same election, in percentage points. Comparing different institutes can mislead, because their methods differ.

The polling trend chart plots each published poll as a point. It is not a forecast or an average.

Governments and ideology

Government composition and ideology labels are editorial information maintained by our team. They are never derived from polling figures.