Tuesday Seminar – 15 October, 2019

Upcoming Talk

Tuesday October 15, 2019: Philippe Mongrain (Université de Montréal), Richard Nadeau (Université de Montréal), and Bruno Jérôme (Université Paris II Panthéon-Assas). “Playing the synthesizer with Canadian data: Adding polls to a structural forecasting model“. Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, Université de Montréal, C-4145, 12h-13h.

Abstract: Election forecasting has become a fixture of election campaigns in a number of democracies. Structural modeling, the major approach to forecast election results, relies on ‘fundamental’ economic and political variables to predict the incumbent’s vote share usually a few months in advance. Some political scientists contend that adding vote intention polls to these models—i.e., synthetizing ‘fundamental’ variables and polling information—can lead to important accuracy gains. In this paper, we look at the efficiency of different model specifications to predict Canadian federal elections from 1953 to 2015. We find that vote intention polls only allow modest accuracy gains late in the campaign. With this backdrop in mind, we then use a structural model to make an ex ante forecast of the 2019 federal election and conjecture that upcoming polling information should not significantly improve the accuracy of this forecast.

This talk will be given in French.

This content has been updated on 8 October 2019 at 0 h 28 min.