Asking about Social Circles Improves Election Predictions Even with Many Political Parties

Abstract

Traditionally, election polls have asked for participants’ own voting intentions. In four elections, we previously found that we could improve predictions by asking participants how they thought their social circles would vote. A potential concern is that the social-circle question might predict results less well in elections with larger numbers of political options because it becomes harder to accurately track how social contacts plan to vote. However, we now find that the social-circle question performs better than the own-intention question in predicting two elections with many political parties: The Netherlands’ 2017 general election and the Swedish 2018 general election.