Why Bother? Supporters of Locally Weaker Parties Are Less Likely to Vote or to Vote Sincerely

Abstract

Voters are deterred from casting a vote and more likely to vote strategically if their preferred choice is less competitive in their electoral district. We use 2019 Canadian Election Study data to show that respondents’ answers to a “how likely are you to vote” question depend on their estimate of their preferred party's local chances of winning, relative to other parties. This deterrent effect on turnout from the competitiveness of a voter's preferred party is concentrated among certain parties (NDP, Green, People's Party of Canada). Under first-past-the-post (FPTP), voters with particular policy perspectives are systematically deterred from voting, relative to other voters. Furthermore, we find that despite supporters of all parties having an incentive to vote strategically if their party is outside the top two in the district, strategic voting is heavily concentrated among voters who prefer parties other than the nationally most competitive two parties.

Time to Move On

“…The possibility for strategic voting acts as an institutional deterrent to true democratic political expression, and especially affects citizens who prefer the NDP and Green parties. 11 On a broader scale, the Canadian electoral system is also susceptible to majority reversals. This occurs when the party which receives the most votes does not win the election.…”

Voting Behaviour in Canada: The State of the Discipline

“…In the 1988 election, voters opposed to the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement had to decide whether the Liberal or the NDP candidate was most likely to defeat the Progressive Conservative one, yet only one in eight of those preferring a third-place party opted for one of the top two candidates (Blais, 2002). Other studies estimate that somewhere between 2 per cent and 7 per cent vote strategically, depending on the election and how strategic voting is assessed (Blais et al, 2001; Cutler et al, 2022; Merolla and Stephenson, 2007).…”

Government Preferences, Vote Choice and Strategic Voting in Canada

“…The influences of the campaign-often seen at the macro level, in the form of debates, leaders' traits, or media coverage-can also occur at the micro level. Party preferences and the expectations of the results at the local level have been found to affect strategic voting (Merolla and Stephenson, 2007;Blais, 2002;Blais et al, 2001Blais et al, , 2009Blais and Nadeau, 1996) and turnout (Cutler et al, 2022). Strategic voting is associated with a preference for a minority government (Daoust, 2018), more common as polarization increases (Daoust and Bol, 2020), and the likelihood of deserting one's preferred party decreases as voters are surveyed closer to election day (Blais et al, 2018).…”

“…In addition, following Cutler et al (2022), we include the relative chance of the respondent's preferred party measured as the subjective chance they give their preferred candidate compared to the subjective chance they give the next highest candidate. This measure ranges from 100 to −100.…”