How good are voters at sorting out the weakest candidate in their constituency?

Blais, André; Turgeon, Mathieu

doi:10.1016/s0261-3794(03)00031-3

Cited by 70 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Blais and Bodet (2006) found that the incumbent party's support was consistently overestimated. This is consistent with Blais' earlier findings (2002;Blais and Turgeon, 2004) that even weak party supporters tend to overestimate their party's chance of success.…”

Section: Literature Reviewsupporting

confidence: 92%

Sources of Bias in Voter Expectations under Proportional Representation

Levine

2007

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties

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A BSTRACT Recent studies have found that voters use information about the latest polls when generating expectations about election outcomes. Even though many respondents to the 2002 Dutch Parliamentary Election Study can recall the latest polls accurately to within a few seats, voters' recollections are imperfect. Using a two-stage least squares regression analysis, we find that partisan wishful thinking inflates the number of seats the respondent thinks the party received in the latest polls, indirectly increasing the number of seats the respondent predicts the party will win on election day. These partisan biases also exert a separate, direct effect on predictions. These biased expectations were not mitigated by increased levels of political knowledge. We conclude that wishful thinking among Dutch voters has a strong cognitive component based on biased recall of information.

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Section: Literature Reviewsupporting

confidence: 92%

Sources of Bias in Voter Expectations under Proportional Representation

Levine

2007

Journal of Elections, Public Opinion & Parties

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“…This supports recent work emphasizing the importance of voters possessing accurate information for strategic voting to occur (e.g. Blais and Turgeon, 2004;Clough, 2007). Regardless, it seems that both voters and parties need rather considerable practice to begin to respond to institutional constraints as predicted in the literature focusing on advanced industrial democracies.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 81%

Electoral systems, ethnic cleavages and experience with democracy

Raymond

Huelshoff

Rosenblum

2016

International Political Science Review

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Recent studies show that the effects of electoral systems and ethnic cleavages on the number of parties in emerging democracies differ from those effects observed in more established democracies. Building on recent arguments maintaining that the quality of democracy improves with experience, we argue the reason for the differences in the findings between established and emerging democracies is that the effects of these variables on the number of parties differ according to a country’s experience with elections. To test this argument, we analyse party system fragmentation in 89 established and emerging democracies and the conditioning effects experience with elections have on the effects of district magnitude, ethnic cleavages and variables relating to the presidential party system. The results show that the effects of institutional and social cleavage variables differ substantially between emerging and established democracies, but these effects begin to approximate those seen in more established democracies with additional experience with elections.

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“…La logique derrière cette hypothèse est que les électeurs sophistiqués sont plus à même de comprendre la façon dont le système électoral fonctionne et donc d'estimer les chances de l'emporter des candidats (Blais et Turgeon, 2004). En effet, un électeur avec un plus grand gap de préférences entre ses deux premières options voit un plus grand coût à déserter son premier choix et est donc plus enclin à voter de manière sincère (Gschwend, 2007).…”

Section: Hypothèse 2 : Plus L'électeur Est Sophistiqué Plus Il a Tenunclassified

“…En effet, les électeurs, et surtout les partisans des tiers partis, font généralement preuve de wishful thinking envers leur parti préféré (Blais, 2002 ;Blais et Turgeon, 2004), si bien qu'ils croient massivement que leur parti est en tête ou, à tout le moins, est en seconde place et fait office du parti le plus à même de battre le rival en tête. Par exemple, les électeurs de la CAQ ont indiqué, à 90 %, qu'ils estimaient que leur parti était soit premier, soit deuxième dans la course, alors que la réalité était tout autre : en utilisant les données du directeur général des élections, on observe que la CAQ était en tête ou deuxième dans seulement 56,8 % des comtés (contrairement au 90 %).…”

Section: Résultats Descriptifsunclassified

Vote stratégique au Québec : analyse de l’élection de 2012

Daoust

2015

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Bien que le vote stratégique soit un thème récurrent lors des campagnes provinciales électorales québécoises, aucune étude n’a analysé le vote stratégique au Québec. En utilisant un sondage du projet Making Electoral Democracy Work, cet article comble cette lacune dans la littérature et analyse l’élection québécoise de 2012 en répondant à deux objectifs principaux : déterminer la proportion de votes stratégiques et identifier les variables individuelles qui influencent la probabilité qu’un électeur opte pour une coordination stratégique. Les résultats indiquent que, dans l’ensemble, 8,4 % des votes peuvent être dits stratégiques. Quant aux déterminants du vote stratégique et tel qu’attendu, le fait pour un électeur d’être partisan et d’avoir un plus grand écart de préférence entre les deux options favorites diminue sa propension à déserter son premier choix. Toutefois, contrairement aux attentes, le niveau de sophistication politique n’influence pas significativement la probabilité qu’un électeur opte pour une coordination stratégique.Despite the fact that strategic voting is a widely used concept in Quebec provincial politics, no research on that topic has been conducted focusing on a Quebec election. To fill this gap in the literature, this article uses a survey of the Making Electoral Democracy Work project designed for the Quebec 2012 election and has two main objectives. Firstly, this research examines the extent to which voters engage in strategic behaviour; secondly, it analyzes the individual factors that influence the proclivity to cast a strategic vote. Results show that overall, 8.4% of the voters can be said to have voted strategically. As expected, for a voter, the fact of being a supporter and having a greater gap in preferences between the two favoured options reduces importantly the probability to cast a strategic vote. However and contrary to expectations, the odds of a strategic coordination are not influenced by voters’ level of political sophistication

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How good are voters at sorting out the weakest candidate in their constituency?

Cited by 70 publications

References 5 publications

Sources of Bias in Voter Expectations under Proportional Representation

Sources of Bias in Voter Expectations under Proportional Representation

Electoral systems, ethnic cleavages and experience with democracy

Vote stratégique au Québec : analyse de l’élection de 2012

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