Tactical Coordination in Plurality Electoral 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.

The Brexit cleavage continued to define politics in the 2019 general election. This posed a challenge for parties and voters on each side of the debate: how to coordinate in favour of their side in each seat. In this note, I examine the extent to which party (electoral pacts) and voter (tactical voting) coordination affected the outcome of the 2019 general election. On the voter side, I find that tactical voting was only slightly more prevalent than in previous election cycles. On the party side, I find that neither the Unite to Remain pact nor the Brexit Party’s withdrawal of candidates against incumbent Conservatives noticeably affected the results. Holding the structure of preferences in 2019 constant, Labour would probably have won a handful of additional seats in England and Wales (three on average but only one clear gain) by joining the Unite to Remain pact. The effect of the pact is limited because Labour successfully won over many Remain supporters from the other parties during the campaign. This meant that voters of the other Remain parties were only modestly more likely to prefer Labour over the Conservatives by the end of the campaign, and the pool of minor party voters was generally small in Labour’s target seats. The Liberal Democrats would have received around eight additional seats if Labour had joined the pact (again holding preferences constant).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

We study the impact of rank-based decision-making in a multi-member plurality electoral system by examining the decisions of Philippine legislative councilors to run for and win higher office. By focusing on multi-member plurality elections, we identify the effect of rank amongst politicians that hold the same office and received a similar number of votes. To identify the causal effect of rank, we conduct a close-elections RD at the village, municipality, and province levels. Our main result is the first place effect: incumbent first placers are 5–9% (1–4%) more likely to run (win) in future elections than incumbent second placers. The first place effect is unique among rank effects: subsequent rank comparisons yield substantially weaker or insignificant results. Further evidence suggests that a variety of potential mechanisms—party alignment, strategic voting, differential levels of media exposure or the better performance of first placers—do not seem to explain our results. These results improve our understanding of the variety of ways rank effects interact with electoral systems.

On 26 July 1998, Cambodia held a national election. It was the first election since the one overseen by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), held in May 1993. More than 5.3 million Cambodians (or 97 per cent of potential voters) registered to cast their ballots. About 90 per cent of them went to the polls. Altogether, 39 political parties registered to contest the 122 seats in the National Assembly. The Cambodian People's Party (CPP) was the official winner with 64 seats, followed by two opposition parties (Funcinpec, with 43 seats; and the Sam Rainsy Party, with 15 seats). The two opposition parties refused to accept the results, accusing the CPP of winning through intimidation and fraud. They declined to form a coalition government with CPP Prime Minister Hun Sen and led protests that resulted in government crackdowns. Were the elections free and fair? Is Cambodia now on its way towards liberal democracy? Observers and analysts have differed in their assessments of the elections. It is argued that, although the elections were freer and fairer than expected, they were not free and fair in absolute terms. Existing structural conditions continue to prevent liberal democracy from taking root in strife-torn Cambodia. The Electoral Process and Results Before the electoral process can be objectively explained, it is worth looking at some of the basic rules of the electoral game, the main political parties' ideological commitments and promises, and their actual political behaviour. Basic Rules of the Electoral Game The rules of the democratic game in Cambodia are spelt out clearly in both the Constitution and the Election Law.(1) According to the Constitution, Cambodia is a constitutional monarchy governed by the "principles of liberal democracy and pluralism" (Article 1). This is compatible with the Paris Agreement signed on 23 October 1991 by four Cambodian factions - the State of Cambodia (SOC), Funcinpec, the KPNLF (Khmer People's National Liberation Front), and Democratic Kampuchea (the Khmer Rouge). According to the Agreement, the signatories agreed that the "Constitution will state that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy, on the basis of pluralism". The Constitution "will provide for periodic and genuine elections", "for the right to vote and to be elected by universal and equal suffrage," and "for voting by secret ballot". Moreover, the Constitution ensures that "electoral procedures provide a full and fair opportunity to organize and participate in the electoral process" (Annex 5, 4). In terms of electoral rights, the Constitution states that Khmer citizens of at least eighteen years of age "shall enjoy the right to vote", and those of at least twenty-five years shall have the right to stand as candidates for the election" (Article 34). They also have the right "to establish associations and political parties" (Article 42). The liberal Constitution does not specify what electoral system Cambodia should adopt, although UNTAC had embraced proportional representation. It was not until the law on the election of the National Assembly was promulgated on 19 December 1997 that this was made clear. It stipulated that Cambodia would have elections in accordance with the principles of multi-party, liberal democracy, with proportional representation as the electoral system in provincial/municipal constituencies. Members of Parliament "shall be elected by a general, universal, free, fair, equal, and secret election by means of secret balloting" (Article 5). Seats for each constituency would be determined and allocated to each political party, only after all complaints have been resolved. The Law also stipulates that "[remaining] seats for each constituency shall be allocated with the greatest average formula" (Article 118). The political principle of "freeness" and "fairness" regarding the electoral process is based on a number of fundamental rules, one of which is the role of the media during the election campaign period. …

Strategic voting in British elections

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

This paper analyzes learning and voting strategy when a budget maximizing bureaucrat has several chances to obtain referendum approval. The process is modeled as a sequential game with a continuum of heterogeneous voters and a dominant bureaucrat in which all agents are uncertain about the true distribution of voter preferences. The equilibrium concept is perfect Bayes Nash, so voting is strategic in the sense of foresighted but nevertheless noncooperative.