Wissenschaftliche Wahlprognosen – Alternative oder Ergänzung zu Umfragen?

Abstract

In the run up to the German federal election of 2013, forecasts about who would win attracted considerable attention. Leaving casual punditry aside, the more serious forecasts were predominantly based on opinion polls. Polls offer a good snapshot in time, but when the election is distant, they predict outcomes less well – a point stressed by pollsters themselves but often ignored by the media and the wider public. However, the 2013 election also saw an unprecedented number of scientific forecasting models that explicitly aimed at forecasting the election result, in some cases months in advance. This overview of scientific election forecasting in Germany focuses on so called structural models. These utilize theory and empirics of electoral research for their predictions. Furthermore, survey aggregation methods as well as synthetic models that combine these with structural models are covered and the performance of such approaches is discussed in the context of the German general election in 2013 and address the question what, if anything, scientific election forecasting can contribute to electoral research. [ZParl, vol. 46 (2015), no. 4, pp. 675 – 691]