Cultures of Speculation: Political Forecasting in the United States and United Kingdom

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Expertise, Knowledge Production, and Authority

Abstract

Since the liberalization of political prediction markets in 2024, American media outlets increasingly covered the prices––and implied political probabilities––in political prediction markets. To boot, the New York Times and 60 Minutes profiled specific political prediction market traders to highlight their skills at political forecasting. The ascent of political prediction markets, and their traders, comes as the public opinion polling industry continues to falter. Oddly, Britain experienced similar polling errors in recent elections, but British media did not turn to British political prediction markets, which have been liberalized for much longer than American political prediction markets, to gauge future election outcomes. In my manuscript, I ask, why are political prediction market traders taken seriously as political forecasters in the US but not in the UK? Through an abductive, comparative-historical analysis of political prediction markets and political forecasting in the US and UK, I argue that political prediction markets, and their traders, rose to the fore as expert generators of political forecasts in the US, but not in the UK, because of the institutional histories of finance and gambling in the US and UK. As a result, in the US, political prediction market traders were imagined as affluent, highly educated, and heavily engaged with politics, while in the UK, political prediction market traders were imagined as lower- and working-class, uneducated, and disengaged from politics. I base my argument on in-depth interviews and oral history interviews conducted with political prediction market traders, administrators of political prediction market firms, political forecasters, and economists in each country. I supplemented interview data with historical newspapers and secondary texts. The theoretical proposition and empirical work further scholarship in the sociology of expertise, cultural sociology, and the sociology of the future by charting how the same future-oriented technology produced conflicting meanings in two countries.

Author

• Rafferty Thompson, Stony Brook University