The Independence Referendum: Predicting the Outcome

Predicting the Brexit outcome using singular spectrum analysis

In a referendum conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) on June 23, 2016, $51.6\%$ of the participants voted to leave the European Union (EU). The outcome of this referendum had major policy and financial impact for both UK and EU, and was seen as a surprise because the predictions consistently indicate that the ``Remain'''' would get a majority. In this paper, we investigate whether the outcome o...

An Alternative way of Predicting the Outcome of the Scottish Independence Referendum: the Information in the Ether

Predicting Brexit: Classifying Agreement is Better than Sentiment and Pollsters

On June 23rd 2016, UK held the referendum which ratified the exit from the EU. While most of the traditional pollsters failed to forecast the final vote, there were online systems that hit the result with high accuracy using opinion mining techniques and big data. Starting one month before, we collected and monitored millions of posts about the referendum from social media conversations, and ex...

Weekly Fluctuations in Risk Tolerance and Voting Behaviour

Risk tolerance is fundamental to decision-making and behaviour. Here we show that individuals' tolerance of risk follows a weekly cycle. We observed this cycle directly in a behavioural experiment using the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (Lejuez et al., 2002; Study 1). We also observed it indirectly via voting intentions, gathered from 81,564 responses across 70 opinion polls ahead of the Scottish ...

Influence of Internal Disputes among Kurdish Parties on the Failure of Independence of Iraqi Kurdistan

The Kurds were originally one of the original Iranian tribesmen who, during the Safavid rule, following the conflict between Shah Isma'il Safavi and Salim I, the king of the Ottoman Empire in the year 1514 on parts of Iran's territory which were Kurdish - called the Chaldoran War- were separated and joined to the Ottoman Empire's territory. These parts today include: today's Turkish Kurdistan, ...