Voting Strategically in Canada and Britain

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to ascertain the level of strategic voting in Canada and Britain through a simple “direct” approach. We wish to show that the level of strategic voting is remarkably constant over time and across space; it varies little from one election to the next in Canada and the level of strategic voting is about the same in Britain and Canada. We show that though the overall degree of strategic voting is low in each of the elections examined, it represents a substantial fraction of those for whom strategic voting is a meaningful option. We define strategic voting as a vote for a party or candidate that is not the preferred one, motivated by the intention to affect the outcome of the election ( Blais et al. 2001 ). This entails that in order to determine whether a vote is strategic or not, we need to know the person’s vote choice, her preferences, and her perceptions of the likely outcome of the election ( Blais and Bodet 2007 ). There are two basic approaches to the measurement of strategic voting: direct and indirect ( Blais et al. 2005 ). The direct method consists in specifying the conditions that need to be satisfied in order for us to conclude that a vote is strategic. The indirect (or parametric) method consists in constructing a model of vote choice and in estimating, on the basis of simulations, how many individuals would have voted differently if perceptions of the likely outcome of the election had had no effect on their decision. In this paper, we make use of the direct approach. We first apply this method to Canadian elections. Since 1988, Canadian Election Studies have included questions about voters’ perceptions of the various parties’ chances of winning in their constituency, questions that are required to ascertain strategic voting in single-member plurality systems. We then turn to the 2005 British Election Study, which incorporated questions about perceived chances of winning.