... another quick thought on hung parliaments: in many scenarios where a party is close to a majority, the minor parties become hugely important. A Labour/SNP/Plaid/SDLP coalition is not entirely impossible, for instance, and nor is a Con/UUP/DUP(!) one. So if you're enumerating possible majority Government alliances, it'll be painfully obvious that restricting to the three biggest parties isn't covering all possibilities.
But OTOH, when you get down to that level of a handful of seats, you're well beyond the likely accuracy of a model like this, I reckon. Especially given that your model has to assume a fixed number of seats to 'others'. And there's all sorts of obscure fencepost type issues that generally don't matter but might suddenly do so in close-to-majority situation, like how many non-voting seats Sinn Fein occupy, the Speaker+Deputies, seats vacant due to death of candidates (there's at least one), etc. And of course the entirely non-zero probability that actual Independent MPs are highly significant.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-04-26 01:06 pm (UTC)But OTOH, when you get down to that level of a handful of seats, you're well beyond the likely accuracy of a model like this, I reckon. Especially given that your model has to assume a fixed number of seats to 'others'. And there's all sorts of obscure fencepost type issues that generally don't matter but might suddenly do so in close-to-majority situation, like how many non-voting seats Sinn Fein occupy, the Speaker+Deputies, seats vacant due to death of candidates (there's at least one), etc. And of course the entirely non-zero probability that actual Independent MPs are highly significant.
So maybe just another point for the Notes.