Political forecasting

Political forecasting aims at forecasting the outcomes of political events. Political events can be a number of events such as diplomatic decisions, actions by political leaders and other areas relating to politicians and political institutions. The area of political forecasting concerning elections is highly popular, especially amongst mass market audiences. Political forecasting methodology makes frequent use of mathematics, statistics and data science. Political forecasting as it pertains to elections is related to psephology. People have long been interested in predicting election outcomes. Quotes of betting odds on papal succession appear as early as 1503, when such wagering was already considered "an old practice." Political betting also has a long history in Great Britain. As one prominent example, Charles James Fox, the late-eighteenth-century Whig statesman, was known as an inveterate gambler. His biographer, George Otto Trevelyan, noted that"(f)or ten years, from 1771 onwards, Charles Fox betted frequently, largely, and judiciously, on the social and political occurrences of the time." Before the advent of scientific polling in 1936, betting odds in the United States correlated strongly to vote results. Since 1936, opinion polls have been a basic part of political forecasting. More recently, prediction markets have been formed, starting in 1988 with Iowa Electronic Markets. With the advent of statistical techniques, electoral data have become increasingly easy to handle. It is no surprise, then, that election forecasting has become a big business, for polling firms, news organizations, and betting markets as well as academic students of politics. Academic scholars have constructed models of voting behavior to forecast the outcomes of elections. These forecasts are derived from theories and empirical evidence about what matters to voters when they make electoral choices. The forecast models typically rely on a few predictors in highly aggregated form, with an emphasis on phenomena that change in the short-run, such as the state of the economy, so as to offer maximum leverage for predicting the result of a specific election.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related concepts (5)

Psephology

Psephology (sᵻˈfɒlədʒi; from Greek psephos) is the "quantitative analysis of elections and balloting", a technique within the branch of political science known as political methodology. Psephology attempts to explain elections using the scientific method and is related to political forecasting. Psephology uses historical precinct voting data, public opinion polls, campaign finance information and similar statistical data. The term was coined in 1948 in the United Kingdom by W. F. R.

Nate Silver

Nathaniel Read Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, writer, and poker player who analyzes baseball (see sabermetrics), basketball, and elections (see psephology). He is the founder of FiveThirtyEight, and held the position of editor-in-chief there, along with being a special correspondent for ABC News, until May 2023. Silver was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time in 2009 after an election forecasting system he developed successfully predicted the outcomes in forty-nine of the fifty states in the 2008 U.