By Stephen Fisher, John Kenny and Rosalind Shorrocks (Universities of Oxford, Southampton and Manchester respectively)

There aren’t so many different forecasts for the general election out yet, but enough to start looking at how they compare. This is the first of hopefully weekly blogs where we review the different forecasts from different methods and combine them into an overall forecast. At the moment, the polls and seats forecasts suggest a comfortable Conservative majority but citizens and betting markets are not so sure it will happen.

The idea of combining forecasts from different sources has a good track record, though it has to be admitted that our attempts for the 2017 general election and the 2016 Brexit referendum did not work out well. We will write more about those experiences soon. Also worth noting is the experience of the pollyvote.com combined forecast of the US presidential elections.

Here we aggregate seats and vote share forecasts from a variety of sources including betting markets, polls, statistical forecasting models and citizen forecasts. As well as updating weekly, the methodology (as detailed below) might well evolve. So comments and suggestions on our approach and for new forecasts to include are welcome.

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