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Electoral Reform & Strategic Voting in Chilean Legislative Elections
Abstract
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.
How do large-magnitude proportional systems affect invalid voting? We evaluate a Chilean electoral system reform that introduced proportionality. Voting is voluntary, and legislative and presidential elections are held concurrently. We compare the invalid votes between different types of elections before and after the reform using various difference-in-differences strategies. We find that invalid voting increased in legislative compared to presidential elections (pre-trends were parallel). The increase in invalid voting is greater in post-reform districts with higher magnitude and is not due to pre-reform district characteristics. The results of heterogeneity analyses and a survey experiment suggest the mechanism behind these findings is the cognitive burden associated with a longer ballot. This research highlights an understudied aspect of electoral systems: higher district magnitudes may be demobilizing in terms of valid voting for citizens who are more vulnerable to cognitive burden, even among those motivated enough to vote in the first-order election.
This article analyses the causal effect of the 1993 electoral reform in New Zealand on party system fragmentation using the ‘synthetic’ control method. Previous studies using cross-national evidence suggest that electoral reforms change the number of parties. However, they do not take into account possible endogeneity problems and usually focus on their short-term effects. Since the electoral system in use in this country before the change was first past the post (FPTP), I can create a ‘synthetic’ control democracy that had the same institutional framework but did not modify the rules of the game. The results indicate that the electoral reform produced the expected effects on party system size at the electoral level, but that these effects tended to disappear in the long run. In contrast, electoral system effects at the legislative level were larger and stickier over time.
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.
In 2015, a center-left government introduced an electoral reform that replaced the binomial electoral system governing parliamentary elections since 1989 with a more proportional system. This article provides an account of the reform process, describes the new electoral law, and discusses the factors explaining the reform. We argue, first, that it was possible, due to the incentives the government provided, to secure the support of an ample majority of parliamentarians; also, a new and favorable political scenario had emerged, in which the support of the main right-wing parties was not necessary for the reform to pass. Second, we maintain that the reform sought mainly to resolve problems affecting the parties of the governing coalition related to negotiations of coalition lists for elections. As a complementary objective, the reform promoted a general interest by establishing rules that allowed a “fairer” system of representation and improved competitive conditions.
Whereas the classic literature on strategic voting has focused on the dilemma faced by voters who prefer a candidate for whom they expect has little chance of winning a seat, we consider the dilemma faced by voters in PR systems who do not expect their preferred party to be in government. We develop hypotheses relating to strategic voting over multi-party governments that we test using the New Zealand Election Study (NZES) campaign study of 2002. We find evidence that expectations play a role in structuring vote choice. While there is clear evidence of wishful thinking there is also evidence that voters respond to expectations about government formation. These expectations may mobilize voters and lead them to defect from their first preference.
Studying the development of stable political attitudes, political scientists have argued that repeated voting for a political party reinforces initial party preferences, in a seemingly mechanistic process of habit-formation. However, the empirical evidence is scarce and the theoretical framework underdeveloped. Does the act of voting for a party improve an individual’s evaluation of this party? If so, is this effect simply due to habit-formation, or a more complex psychological mechanism? Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we examine the act of voting as a choice inducing dissonance reduction. We go beyond existing research, by focusing on tactical voters—a group for which the notion of habitual reinforcement does not predict an effect. The analyses reveal a positive effect of the act of voting tactically on the preferences for the parties voted for and may thus call for a revision of the traditional understanding of the role of voting in shaping party preferences.
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 reviews the implications of recent academic research on the number of seats at stake in legislative districts. It argues that even if Chilean reformers decide to increase district magnitude above 2 (the binominal system), the number of seats per district should remain modest in order to avoid other problems of accountability associated with high-magnitude elections.
Citizens living in presidential or parliamentary systems face different political choices as do voters casting votes in elections governed by rules of proportional representation or plurality. Political commentators seem to know how such rules influence political behaviour. They firmly believe, for example, that candidates running in plurality systems are better known and held more accountable to their constituencies than candidates competing in elections governed by proportional representation. However, such assertions rest on shaky ground simply because solid empirical knowledge to evaluate the impact of political institutions on individual political behaviour is still lacking. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems has collected data on political institutions and on individual political behaviour and scrutinized it carefully. In line with common wisdom results of most analyses presented in this volume confirm that political institutions matter for individual political behaviour but, contrary to what is widely believed, they do not matter much.
In this paper we make a case that strategic voting can be observed and predicted even in PR systems. Contrary to the literature we do not see weak institutional incentive structures as indicative of a hopeless endeavor for studying strategic voting. The crucial question for strategic voting is how institutional incentives constrain an individual's decision-making process. Based on expected utility maximization we put forward a micro-logic of an individual's expectation formation process as a function of situational and dispositional factors. All well-known situational incentives to vote strategically that get channeled through the district magnitude are moderated by dispositional factors in order to become relevant for voting decisions. Employing district-level data from Finland – because of its electoral system a particularly hard testing ground -we find considerable evidence for predictive implications of our theory.
Inspired by analyses of majoritarian systems, students of consensual polities have analyzed strategic voting due to barriers to party success, namely, district magnitude and threshold. Given the prevalence of coalition governments in proportional systems, we analyze a type of strategic voting seldom studied: how expected coalition composition affects voter choice. We identify Duvergerian behavior by voters targeted at the coalition formation stage. We contend that when voters perceive their preferred party as unlikely to participate in the coalition, they often desert it and instead support the lesser of evils among those they perceive as viable coalition partners. We demonstrate our argument using data on coalition expectations from the 2006 Israeli elections. We find an appreciable albeit differential effect of coalition expectations on voter choice. Importantly, results hold controlling for ideological and coalition preferences. Lastly, we explore a broad cross-national comparison, showing that there is less, not more, proximity voting where coalitions are prevalent.
There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one's vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote. They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a wasted-vote or a coalition insurance strategy, but do not automatically cast their vote for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implications for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically.
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical voting as the driving ingredient for the anomalies and introduce a model to study its effect on plurality elections, characterized by the relative strength of the feedback from polls and the pairwise interaction between individuals in the society. With this model it becomes possible to explain the polarization of votes between two candidates, understand the small margin of victories frequently observed for different elections, and analyze the polls' impact in American, Canadian, and Brazilian ballots. Moreover, the model reproduces, quantitatively, the distribution of votes obtained in the Brazilian mayor elections with two, three, and four candidates.
Does proportional representation imply incentives for strategic voting? This article investigates whether adherents of themajor German parties voted against their preference in order to increase the chance of amajority coalition between their favourite party and the preelectorally declared junior coalition partner. Focusing exclusively on the PR vote, the authors test whether strategic voting is guided by expectations with regard to the coalition formation stage. To that end they use a two-step estimation procedure to simultaneously predict (in-)complete party preferences and sincere and strategic voting in a andomutility framework. Their results show that voters preferences, rather than mapping directly into party choice, are affected by their expectations on small parties re-entry chances.
The paper investigates how poll information and coalition signals affect strategic voting, defined as casting a vote for a party other than the most preferred party to better influence the election outcome. In particular if the outcome of an election is perceived to be close, voters in multi-party systems with proportional representation and coalition governments should have an incentive to cast a vote for the party that best influences the formation of the next government. The study focuses in particular on voters’ attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals sent by parties before elections. The study used an innovative design that embedded a laboratory experiment in two real election campaigns, allowing the manipulation of poll results and coalition signals in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that political sophistication plays a crucial role for the accurate perception of polls and strategic voting. Coalition signals are found to have a surprisingly strong effect on (apparently) strategic voting.
The 1980s and 1990s have seen several authoritarian governments voluntarily cede power to constitutionally elected democratic governments. John Londregan uses Chile as a case study of this phenomenon, exploring what sorts of guarantees are required for those who are ceding power and how those guarantees later work out in practice. He constructs an analytical model of a democratic transition and provides a new statistical technique for analysing legislative votes, based upon a detailed empirical analysis of Chile's legislative politics. Legislative Institutions and Ideology in Chile extends existing spatial models of policy preferences by incorporating a valence component to policy choices. The valence component enables an agenda setter, in Chile the democratically elected president, to overcome veto players' objections to reform. Londregan specifically also uses Senate committee voting records to study the impact of human rights concessions on the political debate.
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.
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.
In the early 1990s, major electoral reforms took place in both Italy and Japan; each replaced a form of “proportional representation” (in which voters cast a ballot for a party list) with a “mixed member” system (in which voters cast ballots for individual candidates and party lists). The reforms were enacted by political elites in the context of divisions within the dominant party, changing patterns of party support, and party splits, in efforts to retain power while responding to charges of corruption, clientelism, and lack of accountability. The experiences of both countries provide a laboratory in which to investigate the effects and implications of the reforms, and, more broadly to analyze voter behavior in the context of institutional change. The introduction provides an overview of post-WWII politics and electoral reform in Italy and Japan. In each of the subsequent four chapters, specialists in Italian and Japanese electoral politics are teamed up to review data both before and after the reforms. Within this comparative framework, the authors explore such topics as changes in party competition, candidate selection mechanisms, and intra-party politics. The concluding chapter considers the longer-term consequences—both anticipated and unanticipated—of the reforms. Despite superficially similar conditions, the effects in the two countries were dramatically different: in Japan, the new system has taken hold, with minor modifications, while in Italy, there was a reversion to a proportional representation system. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, to understand why similar reforms had such different effects in the two countries we must examine how electoral systems are embedded in broader institutional and social arrangements, and consider the complex interplay of political geography, political history, and the rational calculations of political actors.
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.
This paper explores the conditions under which voters in emerging democracies support non-viable candidates. We argue that cognitive biases and the geographic clustering of minor-party supporters in ethno-political enclaves lead to misperceptions about the electoral prospects of minor-party candidates, weakening strategic defections both among co-ethnic and non-co-ethnic supporters. We explore these arguments using original survey data from Kenya’s 2007 presidential election, a contest that featured a minor-party candidate, Kalonzo Musyoka, who stood little chance of electoral victory. Despite this, results show that most of his supporters chose to vote for the candidate, failing to perceive that he was not a viable contender. The findings suggest that theories of political behavior in multi-ethnic settings can be enriched by drawing upon insights from the political psychology literature on belief formation.
In 2015, Chile fundamentally reformed the electoral system it had used since 1989. The old system was characterized by high levels of malapportionment, or differences across districts in the ratios of voters to representatives. In the first elections after redemocratization, malapportionment favored the ideological right, but elections since 2000 have yielded no evidence that malapportionment produced ideological bias. The new, postreform electoral system reduces malapportionment in the lower chamber, although it remains pronounced in both chambers. Nevertheless, analysis of results from previous elections, coupled with information about the new districts, suggests that, consistent with recent experience, malapportionment will not produce ideological bias in elections to either chamber.
Chile's binomial open-list PR system was selected by the Pinochet regime as the most likely to optimise the parliamentary strength of the authoritarian right given its level of electoral support. The system was intended to lead to the fundamental reshaping of the party system, but instead, two broad alliances have arisen, incorporating many elements of the pre-Pinochet party system. The small district magnitude puts a premium on the need for parties to form alliances, and leads to extensive intra-alliance negotiations regarding candidate selection. The electoral system is unpopular with parties of the centre and left, but institutional barriers to electoral reform are high.
For a given electoral system, what average number and size distribution of parties can we expect? This book makes specific predictions that agree with world averages. The basic factors are assembly size and district magnitude (the number of seats allocated in the district). While previous models tell us only the direction in which to change the electoral system, the present ones also tell us by how much they must be changed so as to obtain the desired change in party system and cabinet duration. These are quantitatively predictive logical models. Combined with known particularities of a country, these models can be used for informed institutional design. Allocation of seats among countries in the European Parliament is also put on a logical basis.
Analyses of both aggregate-level constituency data and individual-level survey data from the 1983–2005 British General Elections indicate that when available information clearly signals which parties in a constituency are viable and which are not, supporters of nonviable parties vote tactically. Alliance/Liberal Democrat tactical voters tend to split their votes between Labour and the Conservatives, so the major parties derive limited net benefit from them. When Labour faces a dismal outlook in a constituency many of its supporters also vote tactically, and those that do overwhelmingly cast their votes for the Alliance/Liberal Democrats. Strong tactical support received from Labour voters has furnished the margin of victory in as many as a fifth of the contests that the Alliance/Liberal Democrats have won. A party that has repeatedly seen Duverger's “mechanical” factor reduce the sizable share of votes it wins nationally to a far smaller share of seats thus turns out to be the biggest beneficiary of tactical voting.
Using aggregate, survey, and in-depth elite interview data from Spain in the 1970s and 1980s, I demonstrate that the @'mechanical@' effect of the Spanish electoral law is as strong as that of many single-member constituency systems. But the "distal" effect of the electoral law on the party system is shown to be complex and multifaceted, not direct and deterministic. The perceptions, calculations, strategies, and behavior of party elites play a crucial intervening role between the electoral law and the overall shape of the party system.
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.
In Britain in recent years the study of tactical voting has become something of a growth industry. Unresolved, however, is a key question: the number of tactical voters. Despite an election-night estimate of 17 per cent, a variety of later analysts have estimated that little more than one in twenty voters behaved tactically in 1987, a surprisingly low figure in the light of the efforts of various groups to encourage tactical voting in order to avoid fragmentation of the anti-Thatcher vote. Most recently, Heath, Curtice and Jowell, in their analysis of the British Election Study survey, report that ‘just 6.5% of major party voters indicated in their replies a tactical motivation for their vote’.
This paper examines party preferences in Israel from 1993 to 1999. This period provides a unique ‘natural’ experiment in that the middle was marked by a change from a single-ballot party list to a two-ballot system that included direct election of the Prime Minister. The paper has two goals: (1) to explore the patterns of social cleavage voting in Israel during this period; and (2) to determine whether the change in the electoral system in 1996 affected these patterns. Contrary to the findings of previous research — most of which used ad hoc measures of social class — our results indicate that party choice was significantly related to social class. Moreover, the effects of ethnicity, class and religiosity on party preferences were strong and fairly constant throughout the period, suggesting that the change in electoral system had little impact on the party/cleavage relationship.
Japan's new electoral system may or may not be good for Japanese democracy, but it is almost ideally designed for the study of strategic voting. No other existing electoral system provides political scientists with data on such neatly separated but simultaneous single-member districts (SMD) and proportional representation (PR) votes. Using candidate-level aggregate data, I find strong evidence for strategic voting: Candidates with a good chance of winning receive more SMD than PR votes, and those with little chance of winning receive more PR votes. Strategic voting explains not only the basic pattern but also several exceptions to the rule. In addition, I find that a realistic but relatively inaccurate ex ante prediction of a candidate's probability of victory produces a superior explanatory model than does a perfect ex post prediction calculated from the final electoral results. These results support the hypothesis that voters base their strategic voting calculations on simple cues available to them before the election.
The 2002 parliamentary election in the Netherlands will always be associated with the name of Pim Fortuyn. His murder only nine days before the election was the first political assassination in the Netherlands in more than 300 years. The sudden success of the new party he had founded, coupled with the major losses for the Labour and Liberal parties, made this an historic election. This article attempts to understand the motivations of the voters at this election, in particular the voters of the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF). It is first shown that the conventional wisdom, which assumes voting based on religion and social class, and voting along ideological issue lines, has lost its ability to explain voter behaviour in the Netherlands. An explanation based on retrospective economic voting is also rejected. The success of the LPF is accounted for by the popularity of Fortuyn and his appeal among those who had cynical attitudes towards government or who were dissatisfied with the performance of the incumbent government. The popularity of Fortuyn is shown to have been related to political issues, in particular those relating to asylum seekers and the integration of foreigners in the country.
In their article ‘Constituency Characteristics, Individual Characteristics and Tactical Voting in the 1987 British General Election’, Niemi, Whitten and Franklin claim that in the 1987 general election ‘about one in every six voters … had tactical considerations in mind in deciding whom to vote for’. As they point out, this figure is far higher than Heath et al. 's estimate of 6.5 per cent of major party voters having ‘a tactical motivation for their vote’. It is also far higher than estimates obtained by other analyses of the 1987 election using aggregate data. In this Note we point to methodological weaknesses in Niemi, Whitten and Franklin's article which indicate that their estimate is unlikely to be a valid measure of tactical voting, at least of the concept as customarily understood by political scientists. Indeed, when looked at carefully, the evidence they present to support their expanded estimate of tactical voting serves only to re-affirm the original claims of Heath and his colleagues and the other conservative estimates of the prevalence of tactical voting.
‘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.
In the transition from military rule to democracy, the government of Augusto Pinochet bequeathed to Chile a unique electoral law by which all legislative seats are contested in two-member districts. A key implication of this rule is that in order to secure legislative majorities, coalitions have to put their strongest candidates in the most precarious electoral list positions. This generates a divergence of interests between coalitions and politicians. Chile's largest coalition, the Concertación, has resolved the dilemma by providing appointed posts to unsuccessful congressional candidates who accept personal political risk on the coalition's behalf. This study argues that this insurance system has provided the critical glue to hold the coalition together since Chile's transition to democracy in 1990. Recent changes in the electoral environment could threaten the Concertación's control over the appointed posts that have sustained this informal institution. This could jeopardize the Concertación's cohesion during the process of negotiating coalition candidate lists for the 2005 legislative elections.
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.