Kennedy Stewart is an SFU Public Policy professor: I’d classify him as a sociologist of politics. He has a model that takes province-wide poll numbers and converts them into seats. The Tyee has an interesting little interview with him where he explains where polls come from:

The reason why pollsters release results during elections is to demonstrate their accuracy so they can sell polling services to private/government firms after the election. Elections are a perfect way to demonstrate polling accuracy as projections can be checked against actual Election Day results.

Economic theory says that should cause polls to converge because it’s safer to compete on cost or service. Of course a market this small is bound to be full of fail, so instead we have polling companies competing on methodology. The punchline to this is that the Election Prediction Project has horrible methodology but generally does a pretty accurate job.