Abstract(s)
In recent years, the British polling industry has encountered difficulties in its attempts to measure
voting intentions in important popular consultations, notably the referendum on Scottish
independence, the 2015 general election and the EU membership referendum. In such a context,
it is extremely valuable to explore how different forecasting models that use political and
economic variables can be used to predict the outcome of elections. In this paper, we propose
such a model by introducing a political economy equation to estimate the vote share obtained by
the incumbent party in UK general elections three months before the vote as well as a set of
seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) to forecast the results of the Official Opposition, the
Liberal Democrats and the remaining parties.