A technocratic view of election forecasting : weighting citizens’ forecasts according to competence

The present research note contributes to the (citizen) forecasting literature by leveraging vote expectation data from close to 3,200 district-level races in four countries (i.e., Canada, France, Germany, and Great Britain) in order to assess the relative merits of two competing views of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ hypothesis: the democratic view and the technocratic view. More precisely, the paper addresses the following question: Can we improve citizens’ forecasts of election outcomes by weighting voters’ expectations according to their level of expertise