Asking about social circles improves election predictions even with many political parties

Traditionally, election polls have asked for participants’ own voting intentions. In Nature Human Behaviour, we reported that we could improve predictions of the 2016 US and 2017 French presidential elections by asking participants how they thought their social circles would vote. A potential concern is that the social circle question might predict less well in elections with larger numbers of political options, because it becomes harder to keep track of how social contacts plan to vote. However, we have now found that the social circle question even performs better than the own intention question, in predictions of two elections with many political parties: The Netherlands’ 2017 general election and the Swedish 2018 general election.