Citizen forecasting: Can UK voters see the future?

The leading approaches to election forecasting have been statistical models, prediction markets, or vote intention polls. This paper explores a different, little used approach – citizen forecasting – a method never yet tried for the case of the United Kingdom. Citizen forecasting simply asks voters in a scientific pre-election survey who they think will win. This aggregated (averaged) result is then assessed for its accuracy in forecasting the overall election outcome. This assessment is carried out on UK general elections from 1951 to 2005, and then applied to 2010. We find, among other things, that generally speaking the majority of the electorate can foretell the winner in advance.