Strategic voting in single-member single-ballot systems

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.

Elections in multi-level systems are challenging for voters because they are supposed to hold political representatives accountable in a complex system of responsibilities. Therefore, when casting their votes in elections at different levels of government, level-specific factors should be of relevance for voters when making voting decisions. We compare deviant voting behaviour in two specific types of local democracy, namely those where institutional and political factors cluster differently. While local candidate-oriented democracies are characterised by candidate-centred voting systems and local party systems with low degrees of nationalisation, local party-oriented democracies are characterised by closed list systems and local party systems that show high degrees of nationalisation. Using individual and aggregate data on local elections in Germany from 2014, we show that voters in local candidate-oriented democracies seem to be more affected by local factors when casting their votes. However, we also show that our results depend on the respective measurement strategies for deviant voting, as local vote intention in free list systems may be measured in alternative ways. The paper makes a significant contribution to the understanding of deviant and local voting behaviour in multi-level democracies with different voting systems.

Increasingly a case is being made that voting systems are highly manipulable —whether by strategic voting, agenda setting, or vote trading. Yet there exists little hard evidence on the actual extent of manipulation in real world settings1 To a large degree this lack of evidence is a result of voting methods that allow only partial recovery of individual preferences over multiple alternatives and of a natural desire of legislators not to publicize misrepresentation of preferences or strategic agenda setting. Yet if we are to understand the empirical relevance of recent advances in the theory of voting, attempts must be made to apply new theoretical work to real world voting situations. In this paper we attempt to do this for voting in Scandinavian legislatures.Our major concern is with effects of the order of voting on legislative proposals and with strategic voting that takes advantage of existing voting orders. Two distinct approaches are used. First, we present a detailed analysis of three situations in the Swedish parliament in which strategic voting was relevant. From these we conclude that when manipulation occurs in the Swedish context, it is not by altering the order of voting or by the creation of new, confounding alternatives, but by using strategic voting to take advantage of existing voting circumstances. Second, we take a more sweeping but less detailed look at voting in the Scandinavian legislatures. It appears from this analysis that the major way in which strategic voting is avoided is by limiting the number of alternatives to two.

Strategic voting in British elections

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.

Strategic Voting in Two-Party Legislative Elections

Eurosceptic Members of the European Parliament are faced with a dilemma in the European Parliament as they might be supportive of the legislative text proposed while opposing EU’s legislative powers. Both ideological disagreements with the legislative texts and Euroscepticism is expected to influence voting behaviour in the European Parliament. However, this article hypothesizes that Euroscepticism works as a ‘second-order’-agenda having more impact on voting behaviour when issue salience is low. The article provides a unique theoretical perspective on legislative behaviour in the European Parliament. It combines data on MEP voting behaviour during roll call votes in the 7th European Parliament with expert evaluations of the ideological positions towards and opposition to EU integration among national parties. The results show that opposition to EU integration has a significant influence on legislative behaviour, even within the most pro-EU political groups. The impact of Euroscepticism declines as issue salience increase.

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.

The two electoral systems most often used for presidential elections are plurality and majority runoff. Majority runoff is more costly due to the necessity of holding a second round. However, a cited advantage of this system is that voters can vote sincerely in the first round, whereas they need to vote strategically under plurality. In this paper, I provide the first systematic test of this conjecture using an original assemblage of surveys that contain the variables necessary to capture strategic voting in presidential elections (43 elections in 19 countries between 1988 and 2021, n = 63,387). The results show that there is no less strategic desertion in the first round of majority runoff compared to plurality. This finding has important implications for the debate over the best electoral system for presidential elections.

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.

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.

The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008.

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