^aCEVIPOF/Sciences Po, 98, rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris, France. E-mail: nicolas.sauger@sciences-po.fr

Abstract

Suspicion towards polls in France has come to a maximum after their failure in predicting Le Pen's qualification to the second round of the 2002 presidential election. Despite general satisfaction with polls in 2007, we show that their performance is in fact not better than that in 2002 according to some measures of poll accuracy. Even if the final order of arrival of the top four candidates has been predicted exactly by most polls, this is largely due to the important differences of scores among them. Estimates are still based on quite untouched techniques, and therefore suffer important bias in addition to classical margins of error.