Strategic Voting in Two-Party Legislative Elections

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.

The majority runoff system is widely used around the world, yet our understanding of its properties and of voters’ behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all possible distributions of preference orderings and intensities, we prove that only two types of equilibria can exist. First, there are always equilibria in which only two candidates receive votes. Second, there may exist an equilibrium in which three candidates receive votes. Its characteristics challenge common beliefs: (i) neither sincere voting by all voters nor pushover tactics (i.e., supporters of the front-runner voting for a less preferred candidate so as to influence who will face the front-runner in the second round) are supported in equilibrium, and (ii) the winner does not necessarily have democratic legitimacy since the Condorcet winner may not even participate in the second

Voting systems have a great impact on the results of contests or elections. Simple methods are actually used, whereas they do not provide most accurate results. For example, in the Eurovision Song Contest, the winner may not be the most preferred candidate. Condorcet criterion, which consists in preserving most of the individual votes in the final ranking, seems intuitively the most relevant. In this paper, we propose a new ranking method founded on Condorcet voting count principle which minimizes the number of pairwise inversions of the individual preferences. We propose a two-step method: computing the cycles among vote preferences and removing a minimal set of pairwise preferences to erase all the cycles and turn the votes into a partial order as close as possible to a total order. Finally, we evaluate the impact of our ranking procedure on the last 30 Eurovision Song Contests.

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.

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.

Although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention, it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals’ voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences. In this article, we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results. This approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies. We show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election, mainly for Liberal–Democratic voters supporting Labour. Moreover, our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes. We also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting.

Majority Runoff Elections: Strategic Voting and Duverger's Hypothesis

The literature on agendas with sincere and strategic voting represents an important contribution to our understanding of committees, of institutions, and of the opportunities to manipulate outcomes by the manipulation of institutions. That literature, though, imposes an assumption that may be unrealistic in many situations; namely, that everyone knows the preferences of everyone else. In this essay we apply Bayesian equilibrium analysis to show that the properties of agendas that others derive by assuming complete information do not hold necessarily under incomplete information. First, a Condorcet winner need not be selected, even if nearly everyone on the committee most prefers it. Second, the two-step theorem, that any outcome reachable in n voting stages via some amendment agenda is reachable in two stages under sophisticated voting, need not hold. Third, nonbinding votes, such as straw polls, can critically affect final outcomes.

Approval Voting is analyzed in a context of large elections with strategic voters: the Myerson’s Large Poisson Games. We first establish the Magnitude Equivalence Theorem which substantially reduces the complexity of computing the magnitudes of the pivot outcomes. Furthermore, we show that the Condorcet Winner need not be the Winner of the election in equilibrium under Approval Voting. Indeed, a ‘paradoxical’ example is provided where a candidate ranked first by more than half of the voters is not the Winner of the election.

From the perspective of some common criteria for evaluating voting procedures, the results we offer in this essay will almost certainly be interpreted as inditments of STV. Even if we restrict preferences with conditions R1 and R2, STV is not necessarily incentive compatible. Moreover, strategic voting does not ensure the selection of Condorcet winning candidates or of Condorcet outcomes. This fact, moreover is not dependent on the existence of “bogus” equilibria — outcomes that exclude Condorcet candidates cannot be avoided under all circumstances even if we limit our analysis to strong or to individually stable equilibria. It is not the case, though, that the Condorcet criterion is the unique or even the most important criterion with which to evaluate election procedures. For example, we have not examined the extent to which STV ensures proportionality and we have not compared STV to other procedures. Despite the apparent deficiencies described in this essay, STV may yet prove to be a viable alternative to systems that seek to ensure proportionality by other means.

“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.

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.

This study aims to determine the existence of local political parties in Aceh in the 2009-2019 legislative elections. The presence of local political parties in Aceh is a the result of the peace conflict between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Government Republic of Indonesia. The birth of a local political party in Aceh brought considerable influence large in the control of seats in the parliament in Aceh in its first participation in the 2009 legislative elections. However, his presence continues to experience According to him, the decline was in line with the number of votes in the next legislative election. This study aims to measure the existence of local political parties in Aceh in terms of 2009-2019 legislative elections. The research method uses the method qualitative descriptive with research focus on legislative elections at the provincial level Aceh in 2009-2019. The data collection techniques used are: interviews and documentation studies. The results showed that the existence of the party Aceh's local politics continues to decline as the number of votes and local political party seats in the 2014 and 2019 legislative elections when compared to the 2009 legislative elections. The decline in the existence of parties local politics in Aceh is measured from the concept of systemic degree, value identity, degree of autonomy and public knowledge

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Narrowly understood, social choice theory is a specialized branch of applied logic and mathematics that analyzes abstract objects called preference aggregation functions, social welfare functions, and social choice functions. But more broadly, social choice theory identifies, analyzes, and evaluates rules that may be used to make collective decisions. So understood, social choice is a subfield of the social sciences that examines what may be called “voting rules” of various sorts. While social choice theory typically assumes a finite set of alternatives over which voter preferences are unrestricted, the spatial model of social choice assumes that policy alternatives can be represented by points in a space of one or more dimensions, and that voters have preferences that are plausibly shaped by this spatial structure.Social choice theory has considerable relevance for the study of legislative (as well as electoral) institutions. The concepts and tools of social choice theory make possible formal descriptions of legislative institutions such as bicameralism, parliamentary voting procedures, effects of decision rules (e.g., supramajority vs. simple majority rule and executive veto rules), sincere vs. strategic voting by legislators, agenda control, and other parliamentary maneuvers. Spatial models of social choice further enrich this analysis and raise additional questions regarding policy stability and change. Spatial models are used increasingly to guide empirical research on legislative institutions and processes.