The Red-Green Victory: Against All Odds?

Abstract

Picking winners in electoral contests is a popular sport in Germany,as in many places elsewhere. During the 2002 campaign for theBundestag, pre-election polls tracked the horse race of party supportalmost daily. Election junkies were invited to enter online sweepstakes.They could also bet real money, albeit in limited quantity, onthe parties’ fortunes on WAHL$TREET, a mock stock market runby Die Zeit and other media. As usual, election night witnessed therace of the networks to project the winner the second the pollswhere voters had cast their ballots closed. But in 2002, there wasalso one newcomer in the business of electoral prophecy: a statisticalforecast based on insights from electoral research.