Vote expectations versus vote intentions : rival forecasting strategies

Are ordinary citizens better at predicting election results than conventional voter intention polls? We address this question by comparing eight forecasting models for British general elections: one based on voters’ expectations of who will win and seven based on who voters themselves intend to vote for (including “uniform national swing model” and “cube rule” models). The data come from ComRes and Gallup polls as well as the Essex Continuous Monitoring Surveys, 1950 – 2017, yielding 449 months with both expectation and intention polls. The large sample size allows us to compare the models’ prediction accuracy not just in the months prior to the election, but over the years leading up to it. In predicting both the winning party and parties’ seat shares, we find that vote expectations outperform vote intent ions models. Vote expectations thus appear an excellent tool for predicting the winning party and its seat share.