Strategic Voting Behavior Research Articles

Affective polarization and strategic voting in Britain

ABSTRACT Do affective attitudes determine voting behavior? As a part of this broad question, we examine how third-party supporters’ affective attitudes decide their strategic voting behavior. Using seven waves of the British Election Study (2015, 2017, and 2019), we find that third-party supporters whose affective attitudes toward the two principal political parties in their constituency are more polarized are more inclined to vote strategically. The results imply that voting behavior is shaped by both feelings toward as well as cognitive evaluations of political parties. They also imply that British voters may increasingly engage in strategic voting if the level of affective polarization continues to rise. Lastly, and more generally, the results imply that all political parties should pay attention to voter “feelings” if they are to maximize their electoral support.

Effects of Government Systems on Voter Behavior and Strategic Voting Behavior (A Comparative Analysis on Turkey and France)

Bu çalışma farklı hükümet sistemlerinin seçmen davranışları üzerindeki etkilerinin karşılaştırmalı yöntem kullanılarak analizini içermektedir. Çalışmada kullanılan karşılaştırmalı yöntemde her iki ülkede uygulanan farklı hükümet sistemlerinin nedensellik bağları kullanılarak seçmen davranışları üzerinde yaratacağı etki yürütme organlarının yapısı, seçim tarihleri ve seçim sistemleri üzerinden kavramsal soyutlama yapılarak açıklanmaya çalışılmıştır. Hükümet sistemleri temel olarak devletin temel organları olan yasama ve yürütme arasındaki ilişkinin niteliğine göre başkanlık, yarı başkanlık ve parlamenter sistem olarak üçe ayrılmaktadır. Çalışmaya konu hükümet sistemleri Fransa’da uygulanan yarı başkanlık sistemi ile Türkiye’de uygulanmakta olan başkanlık sistemidir. Çalışmada Fransa ve Türkiye’de uygulanan farklı hükümet sistemlerinin seçmen davranışları üzerindeki etkisi stratejik oy verme davranışı üzerinden üç ana başlık altında incelenmiştir. İlk olarak her iki ülkede yürütme yetkisinin ne şekilde kullanıldığı ve bu yetki kullanımının özellikle seçimlerde seçmen davranışları üzerinde yarattığı etki ortaya konulmaya çalışılmıştır. İkinci olarak yürütme gücü üzerinde etkili olan cumhurbaşkanı ve parlamento seçimlerinin yapılış tarihleri üzerinden seçmen davranışlarına yönelik bir değerlendirme yapılmıştır. Son olarak her iki ülkede uygulanan farklı hükümet sistemleri ile uygulanmakta olan farklı seçim sistemlerinin seçmen davranışları üzerindeki etkisi incelenmiştir.

Does Party Polarization Affect the Electoral Prospects of a New Centrist Candidate?

Does party polarization affect the electoral prospects of a new centrist candidate? The paper investigates this question in the context of a laboratory experiment where a centrist candidate is added to the race between a left candidate and a right candidate. The experimental design varies the polarization of the left and right candidates. The paper focuses on the effect of party polarization on the electoral prospects of a new centrist candidate through strategic voting behavior with experimental subjects acting as voters. The paper yields two main results: (1) party polarization initially improves the electoral prospects of a new centrist candidate; and (2) the effect of party polarization on the electoral prospects of the centrist weakens and ultimately disappears as elections are repeated. This happens because party polarization slows down the speed at which voters desert their candidate and vote strategically for the centrist in an apparent attempt at preventing the election of the candidate on the opposite side.

Strategic Voting Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review

Secmenlerin, bir hedefe ulasmak amaciyla en cok tercih ettikleri partiden baska bir partiye oy vermeleri “stratejik” oy verme davranisi olarak tanimlanir. Stratejik oy verme, yaklasim olarak secmenlerin her durumda en cok tercih ettikleri partiye oy verdigini varsayan temel kuramlar ayrisir. Bu calisma, stratejik oy verme davranisina literaturdeki farkli yaklasimlari aciklamayi ve bu davranisin ortaya cikmasinda etkili olan bireysel ve yapisal unsurlari sistematik bir sekilde ele almayi amaclamaktadir. Bu davranisin ortaya cikmasinda analitik dusunme gucu gibi bireysel unsurlar etkili olabildigi gibi, ulkenin demokrasi gecmisi, secilen temsilci sayisi, secim baraji ve secim sisteminin turu gibi yapisal unsurlar da etkili olabilmektedir.

A Two-Party System Under the Proportional Rule is Possible: Strategic Voting in the Lab

In this study, we implement a series of voting games in the laboratory to test whether a strategic voting behavior in a proportional system would arise and induce a two-party system. In each voting game, a finite number of subjects with single-peaked preferences, uniformly distributed on a 0–20 line, are asked to vote for a number within the interval 0–20. The policy outcome is the average of the chosen numbers—a realistic representation of a compromise between parties in a parliament elected through the proportional rule. Our main result shows that polarization and strategic voting occur in the proposed proportional rule scenario. Moreover, experience and information concerning the electoral outcome of the previous period drive individuals to opt for strategic voting.

Electoral Rules and Partisan Control of Government: A Replication Study

Does the electoral system affect government partisanship? Iversen and Soskice answer this question in the affirmative. These authors argue that center-right governments dominate in majoritarian systems, whereas proportional representation systems see more center-left governments. They explain this difference by the strategic voting behavior of the middle class under alternative electoral rules. In this study, we test the robustness of their empirical results to alternative measures of the main variables as well as to a completed version of the original data set. Our replication does not corroborate Iversen and Soskice’s empirical findings. First, we cannot substantiate the notion that center-right governments emerge more frequently in majoritarian systems. Second, a time-series cross-section analysis does not support the hypothesis that the electoral system is a significant determinant of partisan control of government.

Information Consumption and Strategic Voting: Evidence from Brazil

In a seminal work about strategic voting, Duverger suggested that single-ballot electoral systems generate incentives for voters to behave strategically, which ultimately might lead to two-party systems. Dual-ballot electoral systems, in turn, allow voters to behave sincerely, which might favors multi-party systems. Even though several works have found results consistent with strategic voting behavior, some findings also suggest that not all voters behave the same way. This leads to the question on who exactly are the voters behaving strategically and, more importantly, why some voters do not behave this way. This paper investigates whether voters with different access to information behave differently when choosing their candidates in Brazilian mayoral elections. Following the theoretical literature, we predict that voters with lower availability of information are more likely to behave sincerely while voters with a higher information level are more likely to behave in a strategic way. We test this prediction exploiting an exogenous variation in Brazilian electoral rules and using a unique database with information disaggregated at the polling station level, that allow us to identify votes and characteristics of small groups of voters. Our results show that strategic behaviour indeed varies greatly depending on voters access to information. We also show that both demand for information (measured by voters’ level of education) and supply of information (measured by media availability at municipalities) are self-enforcing mechanisms for strategic voting. Therefore, whether a voter behaves strategically or not depends on both her ability to gather information and the availability of such information in her municipality.

Expressive and Strategic Behavior in Legislative Elections in Argentina

In this paper I study strategic voting behavior in the Argentine Senate election for the City of Buenos Aires in 2013. I estimate and analyze the voter transition matrix between the primary and general elections using a Bayesian hierarchical model for ecological inference, utilizing a rich data set of ballot box data. The results show that strategic behavior is not widespread among the electorate in Buenos Aires. In particular, at least 75 % of voters who had the opportunity to avoid vote wasting by behaving strategically did not. I also find high levels of vote wasting when analyzing other provinces during the same election cycle. These results suggest that these electorates might be composed of a mixture of voters with strategic and expressive motivations, where the expressive factions dominate.

Conformity in the lab

We use a revealed preference approach to disentangle conformity, an intrinsic taste to follow others, from information-driven herding. We provide observations from a series of sequential decision-making experiments in which subjects choose the type of information they observe before making their decision. Namely, subjects choose between observing a private (statistically informative) signal or the history of play of predecessors who have not chosen a private signal (i.e., a statistically uninformative word-of-mouth signal). In our setup, subjects choose the statistically uninformative social signal 34% of the time and, of those, 88% follow their observed predecessors’ actions. When allowing for payoff externalities by paying subjects according to the collective action chosen by majority rule, the results are amplifed and the social signal is chosen in 51% of all cases, and 59% of those who pick the social signal follow the majority choice. The results from the majority treatment demonstrate that conformist behavior is not driven by inequality aversion, nor by strategic voting behavior in which voters balance others who are uninformed. Raising the stakes five-fold does not eliminate conformist behavior; in both treatments, the social signal is chosen nearly 50% of the time. Individual level analysis yields the identification of rules of thumb subjects use in making their decisions.

The two-party system under alternative voting procedures

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. This observation can be explained by the strategic behavior of voters. This article derives two broad classes of voting procedures under which strategic voting behavior induces a two-party system under standard assumptions on voter preferences. One class consists of the voting procedures with unique top-score, i.e., under which a voter can cast a top-score vote for only one candidate (e.g., Plurality Voting, Borda Count). The other class consists of the voting procedures that permit truncated ballots, i.e., under which voters do not have to cast all their votes (e.g., Approval Voting). This analysis suggests that the key for strategic voting behavior to induce a two-party system is that voters can always cast a different score for the two candidates they rank first and second on their ballots.

The Two-Party System under Alternative Voting Procedures

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. This observation can be explained by the strategic behavior of voters. The present paper derives two broad classes of voting procedures under which strategic voting behavior induces a two-party system under standard assumptions on voter preferences. One class consists of the voting procedures with unique top-score, i.e., under which a voter can cast a top-score vote for only one candidate (e.g., Plurality Voting, Borda Count). The other class consists of the voting procedures that permit truncated ballots, i.e., under which voters do not have to cast all their votes (e.g., Approval Voting). The present analysis suggests that the key for strategic voting behavior to induce a two-party system is that voters can always cast a different score for the two candidates they rank first and second on their ballots.

Racial, Ethnic or Rational Voters? Splitting Tickets in South Africa

Many scholars worried that political liberalization in South Africa would open the door to widespread racial and ethnic conflict or that elections would be little more than a ‘racial/ethnic census’. Today, after South Africa's third successful election, ideas about the extent to which South African voters cast their votes on the basis of ascribed racial or ethnic identities remain controversial. This paper offers a new way to assess competing hypotheses about the micro-foundations of South African vote choice: by studying the correlates of a strategic voting behavior, split-ticket voting. This is accomplished by analyzing data from a 1997 survey in which respondents participated in a ‘mock election’. The results show that ascribed identities do certainly play a role in predicting strategic voting in South Africa but that they are far from being the only important predictors. This research shows that strategic voting in South Africa is driven at least as much by political sophistication and political ideology as by loyalty to any racial, ethnic, or regional identity.

Endogenous platforms: the case of many parties

We analyze existence of equilibrium in a one-dimensional model of endogenouspartyplatformsandmorethantwoparties.Theplatformsproposed by parties depend on their membership composition. The policy implemented is a function of the different proposals and the vote distribution among such proposals. It is shown that if voters are sincere there is always an equilibrium regardless of the number of parties. In the case of strategic voting behavior, existence of equilibrium can be shown provided a subadditivity condition on the outcome function holds.

A theory of voting in large elections

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections. In our model, voters' strategies form a Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE), which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior. We first show that a QRE in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates, and then proceed to show that, with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters' utilities, a Nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory. This equilibrium (1) consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters' utilities, (2) exists even when voters can abstain, and (3) is unique when there are only 2 candidates.

Strategic voting in British elections

In this paper we examine the extent to which voters engage in strategic behavior. Our contribution is accounting for the context in which voters have the opportunity to behave in a strategic fashion. We also demonstrate that previous measures of strategic voting significantly underestimated the willingness of voters to engage in strategic behavior when presented with the opportunity to do so. We use as cases for our study of strategic voting behavior two recent elections in Britain, the 1987 and 1997 general elections. Our analysis produces estimates of strategic voting in these elections that are substantially greater than reported in previous research.

Strategic Abandonment or Sincerely Second Best? The 1999 Israeli Prime Ministerial Election

The Israeli election for Prime Minister in 1999 featured five candidates. Three, including a major, centrally located candidate, Yitzhak Mordechai, withdrew from competition during the two days before the voting. Mordechai withdrew in large measure in reaction to the strategic decisions of voters, that is, some voters who favored him deserted his candidacy as his poll standings declined. We use surveys conducted during the 1999 campaign to estimate models of strategic voting behavior based on the multicandidate calculus of voting. We find that strategic voting in the Israeli, majority-with-runoff electoral system closely resembled the level and nature of strategic voting found in the more nearly pure plurality systems for which the statistical models were originally developed. The result is support for the reasoning Mordechai provided for his decision, illustrating the interlocking nature of strategic decisions between candidates and voters.

Signaling and Election Motivations in a Voting Model with Common Values and Responsive Candidates

In this paper we focus on strategic voting behavior when both an election and a signaling motivation affect voters' behavior. We analyze a model of elections with two candidates competing on a one-dimensional policy space. Voters are privately and imperfectly informed about a common shock affecting the electorate's preferences. Candidates are assumed to choose policy in response to information gleaned from election results and according to exogenous factors that may lead to polarization in candidates' policy choices. We analyze a subset of symmetric equilibria in which strategies are symmetric to candidates' names and private signals (CSS equilibria). We show that signaling and election motivations pull voters to vote in different directions. We provide conditions that show the relation between the amount of information aggregated in the election and the motivation that influences voting behavior the most. Finally, we show that when candidates are responsive and polarized, all CSS equilibria are inefficient in the limit.

Strategic Voting in Open Primaries

The purpose of an open primary is to incorporate more moderatevotes into the primary elections. This intention may backfirewhen nonparty members strategically participate in theprimary, and the result of an open primary might become even moreextreme than when nonparty members are not allowed to participate.Realizing this, the party members might also votestrategically to counter-react. If this occurs, then it mightactually coordinate the votes of the party's supporters. Theeffect of strategic voting behavior on the result of aprimary depends on the size of the party, turnout rate ofnonparty members, the positions of the candidates and theproportion of voters who vote strategically. Strategic votingbehavior can sometimes improve social welfare.

Strategic Voting in Open Primaries

The purpose of an open primary is to incorporate more moderate votes into the primary elections. This intention may backfire when nonparty members strategically participate in the primary: The result on an open primary might become even more extreme than when nonparty members are not allowed to vote. Realizing this, the party members might also vote strategically to counter-react. If this occurs, then it might actually coordinate the votes of the party's supporters. The effect of strategic voting behavior on the result of primary depends on the size of the party, turnout rate of the nonparty members, the positions of the candidates and the proportion of voters who vote strategically. Strategic voting behavior can sometimes improve social welfare.

Optimal sophisticated voting strategies in single ballot elections involving three candidates

A model of a rational, sophisticated voter is developed based on the assumption that a voter in a three-candidate election acts to maximize the weighted value of the available voting strategies. The model is used to analyze strategic voting behavior in various traditional and more modern single-ballot systems that employ plurality as a decision rule. In each case, the analysis proceeds by first determining the subset of admissable strategies which are undominated by other valid strategies under the assumption that a voter is not risk-averse. The analysis next involves determining isopreference contours that describe the conditions under which a voter is indifferent between a pair of admissable strategies. These contours are interpreted as decision thresholds which mark the boundaries where a voter shifts from one strategy to another and, hence, govern voting behavior in a particular system. Based on these analyses, an insincerity index, which calibrates the extent to which sophistication produces voting that is inconsistent with actual preferences, is computed. In addition, it is determined for each system whether there are conditions where a group of like-minded, independent voters will vote as a block even though no explicit coalition is formed. Finally, assuming that voting is sophisticated and not risk-averse, we analyze the properties of formal equivalence and symmetry between pairs of systems and, in addition, determine whether a system is formally a mixture of other systems.