Strategic Voting Versus Sincere Voting

Abstract

People do not always vote for the party that they like the most. Sometimes, they choose to vote for another one because they want to maximize their influence on the outcome of the election. This behavior driven by strategic considerations is often labeled as “strategic voting.” It is opposed to “sincere voting,” which refers to the act of voting for one’s favorite party. Strategic voting can take different forms. It can consist in deserting a small party for a bigger one that has more chances of forming the government, or to the contrary, deserting a big party for a smaller one in order to send a signal to the political class. More importantly the strategies employed by voters differ across electoral systems. The presence of frequent government coalitions in proportional representation systems gives different opportunities, or ways, for people to influence the electoral outcome with their vote. In total, the literature identifies four main forms of strategic voting. Some of them are specific to some electoral systems; others apply to all.

The psychological partisan effect of electoral systems: How ideology correlates with strategic voting

“…Strategic voting can, in principle, take many different forms (for an overview, see Bol and Verthé 2021). The most common one is strategic desertion.…”

“…4 We then calculate the viability of each party included in the survey. To do so, several studies of strategic voting rely on direct questions asked to voters in a pre-election survey wave (Bol and Verthé 2021). However, CSES surveys do not include such questions (to our knowledge, no large comparative survey does).…”

“…In a first step, we identify respondents whose favorite party is not viable and who are thus potential strategic voters. Following standard practices in survey studies that analyze strategic voting (Blais et al, 2001; Bol and Verthé 2021), we rely on responses to the survey question “How much do you like each party on a scale from 0 to 10” to identify partisan preferences. We then calculate the favorite party of each respondent as the one that receives the highest score on this question.…”

“…In a second step, we need to identify actual strategic voters among potential strategic voters. Once again, we follow the literature and use the vote choice recall question that asks the respondent the party for which they voted at the latest national election (Bol and Verthé 2021). If a respondent was identified as a potential strategic voter because their favorite party was not viable and as such, voted for a viable party instead, we consider that they are a strategic voter.…”

The “Tipping Point” of a Strategic Vote: When Does an Individual Vote Strategically?

“…However, in reality, a voter's favoured party, while influential, might not receive a guaranteed vote, since rules of certain electoral systems create incentives to vote differently than one's first choice. Instead, a voter might decide to vote strategically (also referred to as a tactical vote), 1 which is when someone votes for a less favoured party or candidate because the favoured choice has no likely chance of winning (Blais and Turgeon, 2004;Bol and Verthé, 2019).…”