A New Approach for Modeling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Elections

Abstract

Whether voters vote strategically, using their vote to best further their interests, or vote sincerely, voting for their first choice among the alternatives, is a question of long-standing interest. We offer two innovations in searching for the answer to this question. First, we begin with a more consistent model of sincere voting in multiparty democratic systems than has been presented in the literature to date. Second, we incorporate new operationalizations of the objective potential for strategic behavior than have been used in the past. We offer a test of strategic voting in the 1987 British General Election based on the variance in strategic setting across constituencies in Britain. We allow voters to use available information in deciding whether or not to cast a strategic vote. We estimate a lower level of strategic voting than many other methods have estimated. We also demonstrate that the use of self-reported vote motivation causes errors in estimating the amount of strategic voting, and that this problem is exacerbated the further from the election the self-report is obtained.