Expert predictions of the 2015 General Election

Abstract

The 2015 general election promises to be perhaps the most interesting – and potentially most complicated – in a generation. In a data-rich world, an increasing volume of media coverage of the election horse race focuses on the reporting and interpretation of political data – the polls, constituency polling by Lord Ashcroft and others, geodata on constituency demographics, survey data on attitudes towards policies and politics (such as being collected by the British Election Study), and an increasing number of forecasts that are being updated weekly by psephologists. Many other citizen social scientists are playing along at home as each new set of polls arrives. On behalf of the Political Studies Association, we carried out an expert survey of journalists, academics and pollsters concerning their predictions of the outcome of the May 2015 general election. The idea of the “wisdom of crowds” was popularized by James Surowiecki’s book of the same name published just over a decade ago, but can be traced at least as far back as Francis Galton’s famous experiment at a county fair in Plymouth, as detailed in Nature in 1907, in which competitors paid 6d each to enter a competition to guess the weight of an ox – with the average “voter” guessing the weight of the ox almost perfectly (to the nearest kilogram), as the errors of individual guesses cancelled out.

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ORCID for Will Jennings: orcid.org/0000-0001-9007-8896

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