Resumen de Vote expectations at the next level: Trying to predict vote shares in the 2013 German federal election by polling expectations

Christian Ganser, Patrick Riordan

• We add to the literature on citizen forecasting by examining the 2013 German federal election and, for the first time, trying to predict vote shares. A random sample of voters was asked to predict the vote shares for each party in telephone interviews. We examine the accuracy of individuals' expectations and analyze the influence of wishful thinking and published vote intention polls on voters' expectations. Individual forecasts are aggregated, assuming a wise crowd will make a precise forecast. Expectations do not yield a forecast of satisfactory accuracy and they are inferior to vote intention polls. High-ability subgroups do not yield better forecasts than the whole sample. Issues of sampling and measurement are addressed. We conclude that asking voters to predict eight interdependent vote shares is probably too difficult a task.