The 2021 German federal election: how surprising was it really?

The SPD’s victory in the German federal election on 26 September would have seemed unthinkable in the early stages of the campaign, with the party languishing in the polls. Yet as Mark A. Kayser, Arndt Leininger and Anastasiia Vlasenko write, the result was only partially surprising for election forecasters. Drawing on the outcome of the election, they illustrate why structural models for predicting a party’s long-term electoral potential often do a better job than analyses based on opinion polling