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Comparing Strategic Voting Under FPTP and PRMichigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Université de Montréal, CANADA
Community Midrasha of Durham-Chapel Hill, Durham, NC, USA
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, JERUSALEM
University of California, Riverside, CA, USA
Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA
University of Toronto, CANADA, renan.levine{at}utoronto.ca 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.
Key Words: tactical voting • strategic scrutiny • proportional representation • rational choice • coalitions
This version was published on January
1, 2010 Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1,
61-90 (2010) |
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