Strategic Voting in Scandinavian Parliaments

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.

How widespread is strategic voting in two-round electoral systems, and which types of voters are most likely to engage in such behavior? While runoff elections are common in presidential systems around the world, research on strategic voting in these settings remains limited. This paper explores four different types of strategic behavior that are possible in two-round systems, including some types, such as “strong-to-weak” strategic voting, which are not possible in single-shot elections. We use a nationwide survey to assess the incidence and correlates of strategic voting in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election, where thirteen candidates competed in the first round. We find evidence of “weak-to-strong” strategic voting at a similar rate to that documented in single-round elections in other countries. We find little evidence of other types of strategic voting. Furthermore, we show that voters’ confidence in their predictions of the likely electoral outcome and their ideological preferences strongly predict strategic voting. These results point to the importance of accounting for voter beliefs and attitudes in addition to objective voter characteristics to explain strategic voting.

Five major claims are made in our paper on strategic voting within the context of Japan's multimember single non-transferable vote (SNTV) electoral system (Fournier and Kohno, 2000). Two claims deal with the reconciliation of Steven Reed's (1990) and Gary Cox's (1997) important work on extending Duverger's law to the Japanese case, and three claims deal with the informational effects of partisan labels on strategic voting.

Simple plurality election systems (commonly known as ‘first past the post’) are often associated with the dominance of two political parties. Such systems tend to reward leading parties with a disproportionately large number of seats (the ‘mechanical’ effect) and provoke tactical voting, where voters switch away from trailing parties (the ‘psychological’ effect). We view tactical voting as a coordination problem. A group of voters wish to prevent a win by a disliked party (such as the Conservatives in recent UK elections) and must partially coordinate behind a single challenger (such as Labour or the Liberal Democrats) in order to do this. Crucially, voters have limited information on the situation within their constituency and hence there is no common knowledge of the game being played—tactical voting is a global game. We show that in this setting, voters will only partially coordinate. Furthermore, tactical voting exhibits negative feedback—tactical voting by others reduces the incentive for an individual to vote tactically, since they become concerned that they may switch in the wrong direction. We calibrate our model, and apply it to the UK General Election of 1997. Throughout England, we find that the ‘mechanical’ and ‘psychological’ effects tend to offset each other: tactical voting serves to reverse the Conservative bias that results from the geographic distribution of preferences.

This article takes an interpretive view of what ‘public management’ implies in the context of the strategies and processes involved in major infrastructure development, in this case, of prime harbourside public land, now known as Barangaroo, in the centre of the city of Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. This development, in part, is meant to position Sydney as a globalizing city, at the centre of financial services in the Asia Pacific region. The article uses Clegg's ideas of ‘circuits of power’ to develop an analytical framework and employs a qualitative, case study approach based on a wide range of documents and media reports in the public domain. It addresses the processes of public management in the Barangaroo development, focusing on strategic agenda setting and leadership; organizing by rules; contract relations; no-cost-to government policy; organizing by precedent, especially those embedded in institutional responsibilities and responses; and stakeholder management. It demonstrates that at each stage in the process these have been characterized less by the rhetoric of public management and more by a disorganization of this rhetoric by a complex politics flowing through distinct circuits of power. The critical finding is that public management in the context of a large economic infrastructure development, especially when government is attempting to position a city globally, is far more complex and political than the prevailing rhetoric of the New Public Management, of considered rationality, would suggest.

“The evidence renders it undeniable that a large amount of sophisticated voting occurs – mostly to the disadvantage of the third parties nationally – so that the force of Duverger's psychological factor must be considerable.” William H. Riker (1982:764). For as long as voting procedures have been used to decide important and controversial issues, there have been legislators and electors willing to vote strategically. Theoretical interest in strategic voting dates at least to Pliny the Younger (see Farquharson 1969) and probably earlier. In this chapter, I build on rather more recent and formal treatments of the strategy of voting: those framed in the decision-theoretic and game-theoretic traditions. Most of this work has appeared in the last thirty years and focuses on the behavior of legislators (e.g., Farquharson 1969; McKelvey and Niemi 1978; Miller 1980; Shepsle and Weingast 1984; Banks 1985; Austen-Smith 1987; Ordeshook and Schwartz 1987). This chapter focuses on the other, less well-trodden, branch of research into strategic voting, that dealing with the behavior of voters in mass elections. There are of course many ways to conduct a mass election. This chapter deals in particular with elections in electoral districts that satisfy the following criteria: (1) There is one seat to be filled in the district; and (2) there is only one round of voting, after which the victor is decided. There are many electoral systems that satisfy these criteria: the Anglo-American first-past-the-post system; the Australian alternative vote system; the approval voting system; and so on.

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.

Este artículo analiza dos modelos clave de los estudios sobre las decisiones judiciales. El objetivo es estudiar los presupuestos de los modelos de la elección racional y los modelos actitudinales, en relación con los estudios existentes sobre la forma de votación del juez Harry Blackmun durante su cargo en la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos. Además, se analizan cuatro casos emblemáticos del juez, a través de los cuales se analiza su voto ideológico o estratégico. Las teorías sobre el tipo de voto en los estudios de comportamiento judicial presuponen que las decisiones de los agentes judiciales se guían por dos grandes tipos de posibilidades racionales: 1) actúan estratégicamente cuando se alinean con las opciones de quien los designa en el cargo o de quien depende su reelección; 2) actúan por convicción cuando, ya sea por su ideología o por fallos dentro de la técnica jurídica, toman sus decisiones. La tesis central de este trabajo es que el análisis de la votación del juez Blackmun permite redefinir, ampliar o mirar críticamente varios de los presupuestos de las teorías y los modelos mencionados.

I model sequential decisions over multiple interconnected propositions and investigate path-dependence in such decisions. The propositions and their interconnections are represented in propositional logic. A sequential decision process is path-dependent if its outcome depends on the order in which the propositions are considered. Assuming that earlier decisions constrain later ones, I prove three main results: First, certain rationality violations by the decision-making agent—individual or group—are necessary and sufficient for path-dependence. Second, under some conditions, path-dependence is unavoidable in decisions made by groups. Third, path-dependence makes decisions vulnerable to strategic agenda setting and strategic voting. I also discuss escape routes from path-dependence. My results are relevant to discussions on collective consistency and reason-based decision-making, focusing not only on outcomes, but also on underlying reasons, beliefs, and constraints.

We propose a model where voters are embedded in a social network. Each voter observes the ballots of her neighbors in the network, from which she infers the likely outcome of the election. Each voter may then revise her vote strategically, to maximize her expected utility. Our work focuses on plurality voting, where strategic voting is a major concern. We show that in practice, strategization increases with voter knowledge, yet can improve the social welfare for the population. Real world social networks exhibit a property called homophily; sometimes called ``The Echo Chamber Effect'', which is the tendency for friends to have similar ideologies. We find that homophily dampens the benefits of strategization, and correspondingly, lowers the frequency of its occurrence. This effect may contribute to the low number of strategic voters observed in real world elections. Additionally, strategization may lead to the elimination of less popular candidates, as voters revise their votes to less preferred but more hopeful candidates. This phenomenon is known as Duverger's Law in political science, and we show that it does not hold in certain network structures.

In many real world elections, agents are not required to rank all candidates. We study three of the most common methods used to modify voting rules to deal with such partial votes. These methods modify scoring rules (like the Borda count), elimination style rules (like single transferable vote) and rules based on the tournament graph (like Copeland) respectively. We argue that with an elimination style voting rule like single transferable vote, partial voting does not change the situations where strategic voting is possible. However, with scoring rules and rules based on the tournament graph, partial voting can increase the situations where strategic voting is possible. As a consequence, the computational complexity of computing a strategic vote can change. For example, with Borda count, the complexity of computing a strategic vote can decrease or stay the same depending on how we score partial votes.

What do the preceding results tell us for democratic theory? First, that a majority can always defend itself against 2-issue special interest vote trades with a coalition no larger than that used by the minority. In terms of numbers counter-trades are no harder to organize than 2-issue special interest vote trades. Since we might expect that 2-issue vote trades are easier to organize than trades involving 3 or more issues, this result is encouraging. The author is currently conducting research on the incidence of various types of strategic voting in the U.S. Congress. This research indicates that voter agreements, when they can be identified, are usually quite simple. Thus 2-issue trades may be found to comprise the bulk of the vote trading that takes place in the Congress. If so, then in those cases the majority needs a coalition no larger than that used by the minority to block vote trades that are harmful to its interests. However, for special interest trades involving 3 or more issues, Figure 3 demonstrates that the size advantage may rest with the minority. If size is a major consideration in organizing vote trading coalitions, we should expect then that more of these trades will be successful than 2-issue special interest trades. Given the complexity of trades involving 3 or more issues, it seems reasonable to expect that in Congress such trades would usually be transacted at the staff or committee level. Special interest vote trading carried out at this level would then appear to be the most difficult kind to block. Thus trade size is both important for the theory of vote trading and may also be an important determinant of how vote trading is practiced.

The impact of electoral reform at the local level in Africa: the case of Senegal's 1996 local elections

The academic debate on how voters decide which candidates to support often centers on whether they prioritize their personal preferences or consider who can beat the opposing candidate. American research on voting behavior has largely focused on first-past-the-post (FPTP) elections. However, considering jurisdictions are adopting new electoral systems such as ranked-choice voting (RCV) this leads to several questions about the impact of system adoption on voter decision-making. Particularly, does the voter decision-making process differ depending on the system used? To investigate the impact of RCV on voter decision-making across electoral systems we conducted a survey experiment in a federal senate election. Our findings indicate that in comparison to FPTP elections, RCV elections may lead to decreases in both sincere and strategic voting. Instead, RCV appears to increase voter uncertainty around how to decide which candidates to support and leads to voters who appear to be neither sincere nor strategic.

From Ballot-Boxes to Barracks: Votes, Institutions, and Post-Election Coups