Not what you think! What we really can learn from election forecasts

As this forum demonstrates, the competition between election forecasting models along the US model becomes standard also in Germany. This raises the question about the scientific relevance of this undertaking. It is often argued that election forecasts provide a particularly hard and hence good test for the falsification of theories of electoral behavior. In this contribution, I contest this argument and show that the forecast models presented in this issue hardly contribute to the falsification of theories. Instead I refer to an often overlooked relevance of election forecasts consisting in the models' potential for operationalizing important variables. I illustrate my argument by referring to the literature on prediction markets.