Asking about social circles improves election predictions even with many political parties

Abstract

Traditionally, election polls have asked for participants’ own voting intentions. In Nature HumanBehaviour, we reported that we could improve predictions of the 2016 US and 2017 Frenchpresidential elections by asking participants how they thought their social circles would vote. Apotential concern is that the social circle question might predict less well in elections with largernumbers of political options, because it becomes harder to keep track of how social contacts planto vote. However, we have now found that the social circle question even performs better thanthe own intention question, in predictions of two elections with many political parties: The Netherlands’2017 general election and the Swedish 2018 general election.