Abstract
When a voter chooses between large and small parties in a coalition, strategic reasons may be the tie-breaker. “Strategic voting” is often defined as a vote for another party than one’s most preferred one with the intention to affect the outcome of the election. The presence of coalitions can sometimes be argued to lead to less strategic voting, whereas others claim that coalitions create more strategic incentives. This chapter looks at how the relative strength of parties in a coalition affect voters’ tendency to vote strategically. Comparing two contexts with more or less uncertainty about which parties will make it to the parliament, the findings are that voters cast strategic votes for small parties to a greater extent when there are substantial size differences between the coalition parties. Individual expectations of parties’ likelihood of success are crucial to the decision making.
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Notes
- 1.
The experiment was funded by research grants from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Crafoord Foundation, and approved by the Faculty of Arts and Science Research Ethics Board at Université de Montréal according to the requirements stated in the Université de Montréal “Politique sur la recherche avec des êtres humains” (“Policy on Research Involving Human Subjects”).
- 2.
Multivariate analyses show no significant impact of age on party choice in this experiment, and the sample characteristics should therefore not be decisive for the overall results.
- 3.
This screen lasted for 15 s.
- 4.
For Treatment 1 only the item concerning Party D was included.
- 5.
The original French and Swedish versions were formulated as follows: French : Sur une échelle de 0 à 10, où 0 signifie n’avoir AUCUNE chance et 10 avoir TOUTES LES CHANCES, à combien estimez-vous les chances que… Parti C reҫoive au moins 3 votes? Parti D reҫoive au moins 3 votes? Swedish: På en skala från 0 till 10, där 0 betyder INGEN CHANS och 10 HELT SÄKERT, hur stor uppskattar du chansen att. Parti C får minst 3 röster? Parti D får minst 3 röster?
- 6.
This screen lasted for maximum 12 s (there was an option to proceed to a general waiting screen before).
- 7.
Significance tests performed in Stata 13.0 using the Onemean power analysis-command.
- 8.
The current model may inhabit problems of endogeneity, meaning that the independent time-varying variable (expectations) and dependent variable (vote choice) affect one other back and forth over time. To deal with this, a preliminary Arellano-Bond linear model which controls for endogeneity was run. When the expectations variables are included as endogenous variables they still have a significant impact on predicting vote choice for C or D, under control for vote choice in the previous election. However, some research argues that the Arellano-Bond model leads to other types of errors (Hauk and Wacziarg 2009), and it is not possible to include variables that are constant within individuals, such as assigned preference. Therefore the Arellano-Bond is evidently not the best choice of model for this analysis, and the logistic regression random-effects model is presented.
- 9.
It is also worth noting that strategic voting is not necessarily the most “rational” choice. Given the (expected) behaviors of others, the voter may conclude that staying with preference is the most straight-forward alternative.
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Appendix: Treatment Screenshots (Screens 1–3) (Canadian/French Versions)
Appendix: Treatment Screenshots (Screens 1–3) (Canadian/French Versions)
1.1 Treatment 1 (T1)
Screen 1
Screen 2
Screen 3
1.2 Treatment 2 (T2)
Screen 1
Screen 2
Screen 3
1.3 Example Results Screens 4
Coordination failure
Coordination success
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Fredén, A. (2016). Coalitions, Coordination and Electoral Choice: A Lab Experimental Study of Strategic Voting. In: Blais, A., Laslier, JF., Van der Straeten, K. (eds) Voting Experiments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40573-5_10
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