USING RESPONSE LATENCY TO INCREASE LEAD TIME IN ELECTION FORECASTING

This research explores ways of increasing lead time in forecasting in the context of the 1993 Canadian Federal Election. The aim was to test if the accessibility of voting intentions, as indexed by the time tak en by a respondent to express a voting preference in a pre-election CA TI study, can be used to identify respondents whose intentions are lik ely to change as election day nears. The paper focusses on three model s: A Standard Model that allocates a full unit of support to the party the respondent intends to vote for, a Weighted Vote Model, that alloc ates decreasing support to the chosen party as response latency to exp ressing a voting intention for that party increases, and a Split Vote Model that allocates decreasing support to the chosen party as respons e latency increases and allocates the rest of the support to the respo ndent's second choice. An improvement in the accuracy of forecasting w as made by using the Weighted Vote Model, but this improvement did not extend beyond two months prior to the election. Augmenting the Weight ed-Vote model with information about respondents' second choices not o nly did not result in further improvement, but also resulted in a reve rsal of the previous improvements.