THE ECONOMIST: Britain’s four-party politics looks like a lottery

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It is unclear whether the four-way split would survive an election campaign. Rob Ford of Manchester University points out that general elections have “feedback loops”: if voters think a party won’t win, they drop it. In the past, this has hit the Lib Dems. Yet with four parties neck and neck, any one of them is in danger of slipping out of contention in the minds of voters. Will Jennings of Southampton University doubts that anyone can confidently predict how an election would go at the moment: “People are just throwing out crazy numbers.”