State of the Coalition

Current assessment: Very Good

Chris Hanretty has applied the current state-of-the-art to generate an estimate of the Con-Lib coalition duration:

...

Plug in values of 2.58 for the effective number of parliamentary parties, and 11.4 on the ideological range (admittedly using figures taken from the 2005 election), and all the other relevant dummies, and you get the following:

• Expected duration (days): 2103
• 10th percentile: 222 days
• 90th percentile: 4843 days

Okay, so there’s a huge amount of uncertainty surrounding the prediction, but still, I’d say that on this basis, if you believe the coalition will fall before 2015, you have to make some kind of argument to the effect that British politics is uncongenial to coalition government.