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Abandon Ship? An Analysis of Strategic Voting among Liberal Democrat Voters in the 2015 UK Election
Abstract
Strategic voting occurs when voters make vote choices using their ex ante expectations about the results of an election in addition to their sincere candidate preferences. While there is ample theoretical reason to believe strategic voting should occur under certain electoral conditions and institutional arrangements, the evidence for it in the literature has been mixed. I theorise that the polarisation of the two main British political parties and the highly publicised predictions of defeat for Britain’s primary national third party, the Liberal Democrats, make the 2015 UK election an ideal case for studying strategic voting. I adapt established methods of identifying strategic voting to this election and find evidence that Liberal Democrat voters in the UK voted strategically for Labour and Conservative candidates to maximise their odds of affecting the electoral outcome in their constituency.
... Despite these strong theoretical expectations, there has been ample debate on the prevalence of strategic voting under FPTP. Single-country case studies of strategic voting have found evidence that it occurs (e.g., Alvarez, Boehmke, & Nagler, 2006;Bowler, Karp, & Donovan, 2010;Hale, 2020;Johnston & Pattie, 1991;Kim & Fording, 2001). In these studies, the authors find evidence for the predicted mechanical and psychological causes of strategic voting under FPTP. ...
... With these data I seek to establish whether the reforms implemented to Chile's legislative electoral system in 2015 affected the prevalence of strategic voting in Chamber elections. 12 While previous studies have incorporated voter perceptions of the relative strength of the competing parties into their strategic voting models (e.g., Alvarez & Nagler, 2000;Blais, 2002;Hale, 2020), such data are unavailable for these Chilean elections. However, the shift in electoral rules between the 2005/2009 elections and the 2017 election allows for a limited 'natural experiment'. ...
... However, many studies have found no effect of education on strategic voting (e.g., Evans & Heath, 1993;Franklin, Niemi, & Whitten, 1994). 20 Finally, in contrast to many prior studies of strategic voting (e.g., Alvarez & Nagler, 2000;Blais, 2002;Hale, 2020), I do not include voter perceptions of party/candidate district viability. As these studies note, the psychological motivations for strategic voting are clearly present in voters who believe that their most preferred party is not viable in their district and that their vote for a different party may sway the election outcome. ...
This paper examines the effects of Chile's 2015 electoral reform, which increased the magnitude of districts in Chile's lower legislative chamber from two to between three and eight. This increase in district magnitude allows for a convenient ‘natural experiment’: post-reform voters should strategically vote at lower levels than pre-reform voters. I find strong evidence that voters have responded to Chile's electoral reform by engaging in less party-level strategic voting. However, I surprisingly find no evidence that the reform has decreased strategic voting for Chile's pre-electoral pacts. This study demonstrates that Chile's electoral reform is already affecting voter behaviour and is doing so in line with theoretical expectations.
Although the existence of strategic voting in the United Kingdom and Canada has been well documented, quantifying when a voter will cast a strategic ballot has yet to be done. This article draws on electoral data from five UK and Canadian elections in order to address this gap by identifying a precise “tipping point” for when a non-viable party supporter's probability of voting strategically crosses a 50 per cent threshold. I find the best tipping point measure occurs when a voter rates their favourite viable party greater than 59 out of 100 in the UK and greater than 73 out of 100 in Canada. Both countries also have clear tipping points for the likeability of an individual's highest preferred party and perceptions of that party's distance from contention. Overall, by calculating these tipping points, researchers can better gauge voter behaviour and how, or when, certain factors contribute to strategic voting.
How do voters choose between a mainstream party and a populist radical right party (PRRP)? Existing research says that PRRP voters share specific attitudinal characteristics, but many mainstream party voters also have these attitudes. Drawing on spatial theories of party competition, voters make their decision to vote for a mainstream party or a PRRP based on their perceived placement of the mainstream party on immigration. Looking at the case of the 2015 United Kingdom (UK) General Election with the British Election Study Panel Survey, I analyse voters that think immigration is the most important issue facing the UK. These are the voters that prioritise the same issue as UK Independence Party (UKIP). The findings show that those who perceive the Conservative Party will reduce immigration are less likely to vote UKIP than those who perceive the Conservative Party will not reduce immigration. This relationship holds even when the respondent is highly Eurosceptic and anti-immigration.
Campaigning at the district level can deliver electoral payoffs in a range of countries despite variations in electoral systems. However, effects may not be consistent. Campaigns do not occur in a vacuum, and contextual factors, exogenous to the campaign activity itself, may have a significant effect on the level of their electoral impact. The 2015 General Election in Britain is a particularly interesting case as there was a key contextual factor which could impact significantly on the effectiveness of the parties’ campaigns; the electoral unpopularity of the Liberal Democrats. Using a unique new dataset, this article assesses the contextual impact of party equilibrium at both national and district levels on campaign effectiveness. It represents the first attempt on a large scale to systematically assess the impact of party popularity on campaign effectiveness and demonstrates at both national and district levels the importance of contextual effects on election campaigns.
Based on recent work that suggests that voters in proportional representation (PR) systems have incentives to cast strategic votes, the authors hypothesize that levels of strategic voting are similar in both first-past-the-post (FPTP) and PR systems. Comparing vote intentions in majoritarian elections in the United States, Mexico, Britain, and Israel to PR elections in Israel and the Netherlands, the authors find that a substantial proportion of the voters desert their most preferred candidate or party and that patterns of strategic voting across FPTP and PR bear striking similarities. In every election, smaller parties tend to lose votes to major parties. Because there tend to be more small parties in PR systems, tactical voting is actually more common under PR than under FPTP. The findings suggest that whatever the electoral system, voters focus on the policy consequences of their behavior and which parties are likely to influence policy outcomes following the election.
Using the 1988 Canadian Election Study I examine why there was only restricted strategic voting in single-member district plurality elections. In that election 19 percent of Canadian voters preferred the party that actually finished third in their constituency, but among these third party supporters only one in eight decided to vote strategically for one of the top two contenders. Strategic voting was relatively rare for two key reasons. First, many third party supporters had a strong preference for their party over all others and were therefore reluctant to rally to either of the top two contenders. Second, many overestimated their party's chance of winning and as a consequence did not feel that their vote would be wasted.
On the coalition negotiations in May 2010, William Hague is reported to have told his wife, Ffion: ‘I think I've just killed the Liberal Democrats.’1 The final agreement was signed off on 20 May 2010. It seems the fate of the Liberal Democrats might have been sealed. After barely one month in coalition, the party's poll rating had fallen by 8%. Three months on and three weeks before Lord Browne's report on Higher Education and Student Finance, it had more than halved to 11%. By the seven month anniversary of the coalition agreement, a YouGov poll in the Sun2 had the Liberal Democrats languishing at 8%. It was never to recover. The party's collapse was complete. Four and half years later it polled 8%, its worst UK- wide share of the vote for 45 years. Even on election night party grandees were in denial. In reaction to the BBC/ITN/SKY exit poll suggesting that the number of Liberal Democrat MPs will be reduced from 57 to 10, Lord Ashdown retorted: ‘I can tell you—that is wrong. If these exit polls are right, I'll publicly eat my hat’. The exit poll was wrong, but actually understated the Conservative march into Liberal Democrat territory. Only eight Liberal Democrats survived; the party's MPs, once described as the ‘cockroaches of UK politics’ by former Party President Tim Farron, proved to be far from resilient in face of a Labour onslaught and a brutal Conservative micro-targeting blitz. The morning after the night before, Nick Clegg resigned as leader having taken the party's representation in Westminster backwards at two successive General Elections. The fall from the heights of Cleggmania to meltdown is the focus of this analysis, which examines whether the Liberal Democrats' position was ever salvageable? Did the Liberal Democrats compound mistakes which made …
Although much has been written about tactical voting, few studies have attempted to show its impact on the seat distribution within Parliament and subsequent government makeup in countries with single-member plurality systems. The authors attempt to assess the magnitude and impact of tactical voting in recent British general elections. They build a model of tactical voting by identifying factors known to affect the level of tactical voting measurable using available data. Based on this model, they generate predicted levels of tactical voting for all parties within each district. Based on these predicted values, they adjust actual election data to produce a new set of data containing a would-be election outcome in the absence of tactical voting. By comparing actual election data, adjusted election data, and the seat share of political parties in the parliaments after these elections, they discuss the political impact of tactical voting in the United Kingdom.
This paper examines the usefulness of Canadian political party labels as information shortcuts. We supplement survey data analysis with the results of an experiment that tested whether knowing a party's position on an issue influenced opinion expression. We find that, contrary to findings in other countries, among our subject pool, Canadian political parties are not consistently useful as information cues. The Liberal party cue is hardly useful, and while the Conservative party cue can be effective, it appears to push partisans toward a more liberal stance on selected opinions. Only the NDP cue appears to influence opinions in the expected direction. These mixed findings run counter to foundational works on party labels as information shortcuts (mostly focused on US politics) and, instead, are consistent with previous scholarship on Canadian politics.
Résumé. Cet article examine l'utilité des étiquettes politiques des partis canadiens comme sources d'information sommaire. Nous analysons des données d'enquête ainsi que les résultats d'un sondage visant à déterminer si le fait de connaître la position d'un parti sur une question donnée influençait l'expression des opinions. Contrairement aux résultats obtenus dans d'autres pays, nous constatons chez les sujets observés que les étiquettes des partis politiques canadiens ne sont pas uniformément utiles comme sources d'information sommaire. L'étiquette du Parti libéral s'avère à peine utile, tandis que l'étiquette du Parti conservateur, peut-être plus efficace, semble inciter les partisans à une position plus libérale. Seule l'étiquette du NPD semble influencer les avis dans la direction prévue. Ces conclusions mixtes contredisent des travaux fondamentaux sur le même sujet (portant pour la plupart sur la politique aux États-Unis) et confirment plutôt les études antérieures sur la politique canadienne.
Popular elections are at the heart of representative democracy. Thus, understanding the laws and practices that govern such elections is essential to understanding modern democracy. In this book, Cox views electoral laws as posing a variety of coordination problems that political forces must solve. Coordination problems - and with them the necessity of negotiating withdrawals, strategic voting, and other species of strategic coordination - arise in all electoral systems. This book employs a unified game-theoretic model to study strategic coordination worldwide and that relies primarily on constituency-level rather than national aggregate data in testing theoretical propositions about the effects of electoral laws. This book also considers not just what happens when political forces succeed in solving the coordination problems inherent in the electoral system they face but also what happens when they fail.
Take the number of seats in a representative assembly and the number of seats in districts through which this assembly is elected. From just these two numbers, the authors of Votes from Seats show that it is possible to deduce the number of parties in the assembly and in the electorate, as well as the size of the largest party. Inside parties, the vote distributions of individual candidates likewise follow predictable patterns. Four laws of party seats and votes are constructed by logic and tested, using scientific approaches rare in social sciences. Both complex and simple electoral systems are covered, and the book offers a set of 'best practices' for electoral system design. The ability to predict so much from so little, and to apply to countries worldwide, is an advance in the systematic analysis of a core institutional feature found in any democracy, and points the way towards making social sciences more predictive. © Matthew S. Shugart and Rein Taagepera 2017. All rights reserved.
This paper fits into a growing literature about the conceptualisation and measurement of strategic voting. Here we compare the results obtained by applying a ‘direct’ method of measurement based on respondents' reported preferences and behavior with those produced by an ‘indirect’ method that relies on modeling the voting act in both the absence and presence of variables about the parties' chances of winning. Our data are derived from a three-party contest in an single-member plurality system, the 1999 election in the province of Ontario. We find that the two methods converge closely in predicting the aggregate amount of strategic voting, a surprisingly low 4–6%. The direct method, however, is more useful when it comes to identifying which particular individuals did and did not vote strategically.
We propose a method for measuring strategic voting in multiparty plurality elections, and we apply that method to the 1997 Canadian election. The first stage of the inquiry determines whether voters' expectations about the outcome of the election have an independent effect on vote choice, after controlling their preferences, more specifically their party identification and evaluations of parties and leaders. We show that in the 1997 Canadian election perceptions of the local race in the constituency did affect the vote, but not perceptions of the race for who would form the government and the official opposition. The second stage of the analysis consists in assessing for each respondent whether her vote was sincere or strategic: a respondent is deemed to have cast a strategic vote if whether her expectations about the outcome of the election are considered or not leads to a different prediction about which party she is most likely to support. On that basis, we estimate that about 3% of voters cast a strategic vote in the 1997 election.
The paper proposes a two-step procedure to measure strategic voting in legislative elections. The approach uses voters' rank-order of preferences as well as their perceptions of the parties' chances of winning the election. It proceeds in two steps. The first step consists of identifying the pool of potential strategic voters, those who are faced with a strategic choice because their most preferred party (candidate) is perceived to have smaller chances of winning than their second choice. The second stage is confined to that group for whom strategic voting is a real option. We examine the actual vote decisions of that group, and relate them to the intensity of preferences and perceptions of the race. The methodology is applied to the 1988 Canadian election. We show that at least 6 per cent of the total electorate can be said to have voted strategically. We also show that the propensity to vote strategically increases when the intensity of preference for the first choice over the second decreases, when the second choice is perceived to have much better chances of winning than the first choice, and when the race between the second and third choices gets closer.
The 2015 general election in Britain saw a major attempt by a relatively new party - the UK Independence Party (UKIP)- to secure elected representation. While UKIP received nearly four million votes, the party left the 2015 general election with just one Member of Parliament. Our evidence, drawn from analysis of British Election survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews with activists, suggests that UKIP's campaign was a major factor in its inability to translate widespread support into elected representation. While the party pursued a targeted campaign, this had only a modest impact on its own vote. UKIP's lack of resources, inexperience and inability to operationalize highly effective, targeted local campaigns severely hamstrung the party and prevented it from converting support into MPs at Westminster.
In a recent Note we investigated the incidence of tactical voting in the British election of 1987. A major hypothesis was that in situations where it made sense (i.e., in which voters preferred a party that was a long way from contention, so that a vote for that party was likely to be ‘wasted’), tactical voting would be much more frequent than had hitherto been assumed. We discovered that this was indeed the case; in what we called ‘objectively tactical situations’, tactical voting was as high as 25 per cent or more in the general case, rising to more than 50 per cent among highly educated weak partisans who had strong negative feelings about the winning party. In the process, however, we discovered what appeared to be an anomaly in need of further exploration.
‘Tactical voting’ refers to voting contrary to one's nominal preferences. The usual form of tactical voting described in the literature consists of ‘third’ party supporters in plurality electoral settings voting for one of the two major parties in their constituency. This Note aims to demonstrate both theoretically and empirically the existence of the converse phenomenon, i.e. followers of one of the two big parties voting for a small one. We shall call this phenomenon ‘inverse tactical voting’ (ITV).
The analyses presented in this note have extended earlier work on tactical voting in Great Britain by looking at variations between constituencies in the flow-of-the-vote matrix that are consistent with hypotheses of tactical voting. They have suggested that about 4 per cent of the British electorate voted tactically in 1983, as did nearly 6 per cent in 1987. The volume of tactical voting was greater in Conservative-held than in Labour-held seats, and in both was greater the more marginal the seat. In general, the opposition party with the greatest chance of unseating the incumbent, as suggested by the result of the previous election, gained from the tactical voting process, and there is evidence that greater campaign effort, as indexed by constituency spending, helped them in this.
The issue of ‘tactical voting’ aroused a great deal of interest during the 1987 United Kingdom general election campaign. This Note considers the nature and importance of tactical voting in Britain and makes an attempt to detect its presence empirically using electoral data.
At the end of this series of comments, rejoinders and second thoughts on tactical voting it may not be entirely clear what is actually in dispute. The aim of this Note, therefore, is simply to take stock and to try to elucidate the points on which there is agreement and disagreement.
Whether citizens vote strategically, using their votes to defeat their least-preferred candidate, or vote sincerely, voting for their first choice among the alternatives, is a question of longstanding interest. We offer two innovations in searching for the answer to this question. First, we begin with a more consistent model of sincere voting in multiparty democratic systems than has been presented in the literature to date. Secondly, we incorporate a new operationalization of the objective potential for strategic behaviour. We offer a test of strategic voting in the 1987 British general election based on the variance in strategic setting across constituencies in Britain. We allow voters to use available information about the relative standings of parties in their constituency in deciding whether or not to cast a strategic vote. We estimate a lower level of strategic voting than many other methods have estimated. We also demonstrate that the use of self-reported vote motivation causes errors in estimating the amount of strategic voting, and that this problem is exacerbated the further from the election the self-report is obtained.
There has been substantial debate on the measurement of tactical voting in this Journal, much of which has actually been concerned with the definition of a tactical vote. For this reason it is necessary to go ‘back to basics’ to examine the notion of a tactical vote within rational choice theory and follow its implications for the measurement of tactical voting. This Note has four aims: to elucidate the formal theoretical concepts behind the notion of tactical voting; to provide a practical definition of tactical voting based on those concepts; to examine and use the implications of the theory and definition to evaluate existing measures of tactical voting; and to further appraise measures of tactical voting from general methodological considerations. This Note focuses on tactical voting in single-member simple-plurality electoral systems. The following section argues that the range of situations where it may be optimal to vote tactically is both broader and less well defined than previous authors have generally realized. This implies that both the definition, and therefore the measurement, of tactical voting rest mainly on the criteria of voting for a party other than the first choice and doing so in order to best influence who wins. The empirical section examines various approaches to the measurement of tactical voting and argues that the Heath et
al. measure is a
priori the most attractive available. 1 Furthermore, detailed analysis using British Election Study (BES) data from English voters in 1987, 1992 and 1997, 2 shows that whilst the Heath et
al. measure is relatively robust, it can be usefully revised to improve consistency with the strength-of-feeling scores. A corresponding method for identifying a voter's preferred party is also presented.
We report on findings from alternative ways of assessing the meaning given to “left” and “right” by respondents in the 1984 National Election Study. Approximately 40 per cent of the sample supplied definitions of the concepts; in comparison, about 60 per cent stated their feelings toward left-wingers and right-wingers and described their political orientations using a seven-point left/right rating scale. Left signified socialism or communism for about one-half of those who supplied definitions, and dislike for left-wingers seemed to be associated with these conceptions of left. Right, which was much more highly regarded than left, signified conservatism for one-quarter of those who defined the term. We also factor analyzed respondents' self-ratings on the left/right scale along with their answers to 15 attitude statements. Left was weakly associated with support for labour's use of the strike weapon. In a criterion group of respondents who had completed university and who had ventured definitions of left and right, self-ratings correlated with factors tapping attitudes toward the military and toward economic disparity and social welfare. As expected, respondents' ratings of themselves on the left/right scale were more similar to their ratings of their preferred parties than to their ratings of other parties. The relationship between self-ratings and ratings of preferred parties generally varied directly with the strength of party identification. We conclude with some observations about the political utility of political labels such as left and right.
Tactical voting is an important element of British electoral behaviour, with approximately one sixth of all voters surveyed indicating that they voted tactically at the 2010 general election. Such voting for one’s second preference party rather than one’s first in order to prevent a less preferred party winning in a constituency is only rational in certain circumstances, reflecting the local context and electors’ perceptions of the tactical situation there. Using 2010 British Election Study Internet survey data, this paper uses three separate definitions of tactical voting (two self-defined by the respondents, one inferred from a separate indication of their preferences) to test whether rational voting models successfully predict such behaviour. The findings are very clear and consistent with the theory, for all three groups.
The paper examines voters’ capacity to determine which of the three main parties (the Liberals, the Conservatives, and the New Democratic Party) was weakest in their constituency in the 1988 Canadian election. We find that half of the voters correctly identified the party that would finish third in their constituency. Voters who did not identify with the third party and who were well informed were generally able to predict correctly which party would finish third. The rational expectations condition did not hold so well among other subgroups of the electorate.
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.
On Methods of Electing Representatives
- Droop
- Anderson