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Strategic Voting in Plurality Elections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Daniel Kselman  and
Emerson Niou
Daniel Kselman*
Affiliation:
Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Juan March Institute, Castelló Street, 77, Madrid, Spain 28006
Emerson Niou
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Duke University, 326 Perkins Library, Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708. e-mail: niou@duke.edu
*
e-mail: dmk10@duke.edu (corresponding author)
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Abstract

This paper extends the Calculus of Voting of McKelvey and Ordeshook, providing the first direct derivation of the conditions under which voters will vote strategically: choose their second-most preferred candidate in order to prevent their least-preferred candidate from winning. Addressing this theoretical problem is important, as nearly all empirical research on strategic voting either implicitly or explicitly tests hypotheses which originate from this seminal model. The formal result allows us to isolate the subset of voters to which strategic voting hypotheses properly apply and in turn motivates a critical reevaluation of past empirical work. In making this argument, we develop a unified and parsimonious framework for understanding competing models of tactical voter choice. The typology helps to elucidate the methodological difficulties in studying tactical behavior when faced with heterogeneous explanatory models and suggests the need for both theoretical caution and more precise data instruments in future empirical work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Spring 2010 , pp. 227 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We would like to thank John Aldrich, Gary Cox, Dean Lacy, Brendan Nyhan, Camber Warren, and anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on past versions of the paper.

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