Why do polling companies keep getting it wrong?
This year to date has proven to be a nightmare year for opinion polling companies across Europe.
The Scottish Referendum in September 2014 turned out to be difficult to predict, although opinion polling companies such as YouGov came close to predicting the final outcome. The recent Israeli election, combined with the recent General Elections in both the United Kingdom and Poland have also further shown the electoral volatility of voters and a more pronounced difficulty for opinion polling companies to translate their forecasting for vote shares into seat shares. This paper discusses why voting behaviour is becoming increasingly difficult to predict and why seat share predictions should be currently treated with caution.
Read the paper here
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