European election predictions

Burson-Marsteller have again commissioned Simon Hix and Michael Marsh (this time joined by Nick Vivyan) to carry out a prediction of the European Parliament election results. The whole prediction has a rather fancy website here. Hix and Marsh produced a similar prediction for the 2004 elections, which predicted that the EPP-ED would manager 285 seats, the PES 217 seats and the ELDR 73 seats. UEN 28, Greens 40 and the then EDD would be eliminated. In the UK they predicted that the 2004 result would be CON 32, LAB 27, LD 12, SNP 2 and PC 2, with the Greens and UKIP loosing all their seats. Of course, that didn't happen. In fact UKIP didn't lose all their seats, they tripled them to 12 seats.

This time round they have a rather fancier model, which takes into account the latest opinion polls, the last national election, who is in government, how close the last national election was to the last european election. They also factor in whether the party is an "anti-European" party, who apparently tend to do better in EU elections and which they presumably hope will deal with the "UKIP effect". For the over predictions and the prediction in each of the other member states visit the website here. For the UK, Hix, Marsh and Vivyan predict that the number of seats for each party will be CON 27(nc), LAB 22(+3), LDEM 13(+1), UKIP 4(-8), SNP 2(nc), PC 1(nc), GRN 0(-2).

(UPDATE: There were problems moving the server over, so there may still be outages over the next few days until it's finally all sorted out)

(UPDATE2: Another server change, this time to a new provider, so comments from the last day have sadly vanished. Fingers crossed this should be the last switch, so you can now leave comments without worrying they might vanish!)