NEWS AND VIEWS
Australia

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The Owl's Election Indicators

Readers of The Economist may be familiar with the political predictions of the Iowa Electronic Markets. That great British magazine regularly publishes the market on the US Presidential election as an alternative to relying on the opinion polls because history shows it is a better indicator. Without going in to all the detail (you can read that for yourself here ) the average error of opinion polls is 1.9% compared to an error of 1.5% for markets.

The Iowa Electronic Markets are operated by faculty at the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business as part of its research and teaching mission. Because of the limited range of events it operates on, the Owl uses the prediction markets of Betfair, Intrade and the markets of leading bookmakers to keep track of the probabilities.

	RESULT OF PREVIOUS INDICATORS
	North Carolina - Democratic Primary 6 May 2008	Barack Obama Hillary Clinton	92.0% 8.0%
	Indiana - Democratic Primary 6 May 2008	Barack Obama Hillary Clinton	19.1% 80.9%
	Democrat Presidential Candidate	Barack Obama Hillary Clinton Al Gore	72.9% 22.7% 4.4%
	US Presidential Election - Party of President 4 November 2008	Democrat Republican Any other party	59.2% 39.6% 1.2%
	UK General Election - Prime Minister's Party	Labour Conservative Liberal Democrats	35.4% 62.5% 2.1%
	Australian Federal Election - due 2010	Labor Liberal-National Coalition