Analysis - Bookies win again versus emotion-skewed opinion polls

Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives won an outright parliamentary majority in a major upset that came after months of polls, including nearly a dozen on election day itself, showed them neck-and-neck with the main opposition Labour Party. Yet bookies and so-called 'prediction markets' consistently forecast the Conservatives would be the largest party and that Cameron, who had led a coalition with the smaller Liberal Democrats since 2010, would stay in office. Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams is director of the Political Forecasting Unit at Nottingham Business School. While polls and bookies often point in the same direction, Vaughan Williams claims the latter has been closer to the actual result in all 10 national votes he has studied since 2000.