The Predictive Power of Political Pundits: Prescient or Pitiful?
Phillip Metaxas and
Andrew Leigh
No 4261, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
Although Australian political pundits frequently make predictions about the future, little systematic evidence exists on the accuracy of these predictions. To assess the predictive power of experts, we survey the transcripts of two well-known political programs – Insiders and Meet the Press – and record all falsifiable forecasts. Looking at the three months prior to both the 2007 and 2010 Federal elections, we are struck by the paucity of falsifiable predictions, with most pundits heavily qualifying their predictions (so that they can never be said to be wrong). In 32 hours of television, we identify 20 falsifiable forecasts in our sample, of which we judge 13 to be correct. We conclude with some suggestions for political talk shows and for political scientists seeking to better analyse expert predictions.
Keywords: expert prediction; forecast accuracy; elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D70 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp4261.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_4261
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().