With the Victorian election almost upon us there are many guides to individual seats available. To add to these I have developed a simple regression model to predict the 2010 Labor primary and two-party preferred votes and the 2010 Green vote in each electorate from the social composition of the electorate as revealed by the 2011 census. As this is a ‘back of the envelope’ exercise I have kept it simple. The dependent variables are the portion of the electorates’ population that do not speak English at home and the portion not employed in professional-managerial occupations. I have also included a dummy variable for ‘agricultural electorates’; defined as those in which more than 5% of the workforce is employed in agriculture, forestry or fishing. This model sheds light on the distinctive features of individual regions and possible personal votes. The final results and residuals are available here.
The results are: Continue reading