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Crowdsourcing the vote: New horizons in citizen forecasting

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  • Temporão, Mickael
  • Dufresne, Yannick
  • Savoie, Justin
  • Linden, Clifton van der

Abstract

People do not know much about politics. This is one of the most robust findings in political science and is backed by decades of research. Most of this research has focused on people’s ability to know about political issues and party positions on these issues. But can people predict elections? Our research uses a very large dataset (n>2,000,000) collected during ten provincial and federal elections in Canada to test whether people can predict the electoral victor and the closeness of the race in their district throughout the campaign. The results show that they can. This paper also contributes to the emerging literature on citizen forecasting by developing a scaling method that allows us to compare the closeness of races and that can be applied to multiparty contexts with varying numbers of parties. Finally, we assess the accuracy of citizen forecasting in Canada when compared to voter expectations weighted by past votes and political competency.

Suggested Citation

  • Temporão, Mickael & Dufresne, Yannick & Savoie, Justin & Linden, Clifton van der, 2019. "Crowdsourcing the vote: New horizons in citizen forecasting," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 1-10.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:35:y:2019:i:1:p:1-10
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2018.07.011
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Leiter, Debra & Murr, Andreas & Rascón Ramírez, Ericka & Stegmaier, Mary, 2018. "Social networks and citizen election forecasting: The more friends the better," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 235-248.
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    4. Murr, Andreas E., 2015. "The wisdom of crowds: Applying Condorcet’s jury theorem to forecasting US presidential elections," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 31(3), pages 916-929.
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