uk-2024-electoral-divergence / DATA_DICTIONARY.md
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AFOS UK 2024 Electoral Divergence dataset (prediction market vs polls)
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Data Dictionary: AFOS · United Kingdom 2024 Electoral Divergence

Every file and column, with type, unit and provenance. Party-level: polls measure party vote share, the market prices the probability of winning the most seats (FPTP plurality). Values are never imputed or smoothed, missing values are left blank.


polls/uk-polls.csv

Party vote-share polling, long format, one row per party × poll.

Column Type Notes
poll_date date Last date of poll (YYYY-MM-DD).
fieldwork string Date or window as published.
pollster string Polling firm (YouGov, Savanta, Deltapoll, Opinium, Ipsos, Survation, More in Common, …).
sample integer Sample size, blank when not declared (thousands separators normalized).
party string Party (canonical): Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems, Reform, Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru.
party_full string Full party name (Labour Party, Conservative Party, Liberal Democrats, Reform UK, …).
percent number Party vote-share intention, %.

polls/uk-polls.json

Full structured polls (pollster, fieldwork, sample, per-party results). Deduplicated by (pollster, date), keeping the most complete row. Parsed from the single national voting-intention table of 2024 (older-year and regional tables excluded).


data/uk-market-odds-timeseries.csv

Polymarket "wins the most seats" probability per series, daily, from the "Which party wins the most seats after UK Election?" market.

Column Type Notes
date date YYYY-MM-DD.
party string Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems, Reform, Other.
polymarket_pct number Implied probability of winning the most seats, %.
volume_usd number Cumulative traded volume for that series, USD (total market about US$ 1.76M).

Post-election resolution points (after 2024-07-04) were dropped, so the series ends on election day. This removes a settlement spike on the Reform series on 5 July.

data/uk-divergence-timeseries.csv

Market × poll divergence per party, each poll's vote share joined to that party's market odds on the poll's date (nearest on or before). Only the four parties present in both market and polls cross: Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems, Reform.

Column Type Notes
poll_date date Poll date.
pollster string Polling firm.
party string Canonical party name.
poll_pct number Party vote share, %.
polymarket_pct number Market "wins most seats" probability on polymarket_date, %.
polymarket_date date Market date used (nearest on-or-before poll_date).
divergence_pp number polymarket_pct minus poll_pct, percentage points.

Interpretation caveat: a poll reports vote share, the market prices probability of winning the most seats (the FPTP plurality). The two are different quantities, so divergence_pp is the spread AFOS tracks, not an error metric. In 2024 Labour led the vote around 39% while the market priced it near 99% to win the most seats, and first-past-the-post turned 33.7% of the vote into 411 of 650 seats. Polls before the market opened (2024-05-01) are not joined: 523 such poll rows are left out of the divergence file by design, and that is logged when the build runs.

data/uk-poly-raw.json

Raw Polymarket payload (event plus per-series price histories) for the most-seats market, via a US-resolving function, kept for provenance.

data/uk-poly-vote-share-raw.json

Raw payload for the secondary "UK Election: Labour % of the vote?" market, kept for provenance.


Sources: Wikipedia: Opinion polling for the 2024 United Kingdom general election · Polymarket "Which party wins the most seats after UK Election?". Maintained by AFOS Analytics. Data CC BY 4.0, code Apache 2.0.