Abandon Ship? An Analysis of Strategic Voting among Liberal Democrat Voters in the 2015 UK Election

Abstract

Strategic voting occurs when voters make vote choices using their ex ante expectations about the results of an election in addition to their sincere candidate preferences. While there is ample theoretical reason to believe strategic voting should occur under certain electoral conditions and institutional arrangements, the evidence for it in the literature has been mixed. I theorise that the polarisation of the two main British political parties and the highly publicised predictions of defeat for Britain’s primary national third party, the Liberal Democrats, make the 2015 UK election an ideal case for studying strategic voting. I adapt established methods of identifying strategic voting to this election and find evidence that Liberal Democrat voters in the UK voted strategically for Labour and Conservative candidates to maximise their odds of affecting the electoral outcome in their constituency.

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

“…For example, I ran the regression formula using a linear model, which provided similar results to the main logistic output. I also ran the difference in ratings between the preferred party and favourite viable party leaders to confirm that the influence of party leader ratings holds when evaluating them relative to one another, similar to other studies (Hale, 2020). Finally, I also compared the probability of voting strategically using the output regression formula with each individual's actual vote type, demonstrating the accuracy of my model to predict a strategic vote.…”

“…By combining party ratings, affiliation, and leader ratings into a single “preference” variable, they find a higher preference score is associated with a lesser chance of voting strategically across four Canadian elections (1988, 1993, 1997, 2000) and one British election (2005). Other studies have also demonstrated a positively correlated relationship between likeable leader evaluations and voting sincerely (Blais et al, 2005; Hale, 2020).…”

“…Given that the decision to vote strategically is based, in theory, on maximizing one's impact on the election results, a voter should be more inclined to vote strategically if that person perceives the contest as being close, since one's vote could presumably make a difference. Studies by Blais and Nadeau (1996) and Hale (2020) both prove that this variable positively correlates with strategic voting. However, two other studies, Niemi et al (1992) and Alvarez et al (2006), find this variable does not have a significant effect, especially when compared to the distance-from-contention variable.…”

“…For example, Niemi et al (1992) found in their study that the further a person's preferred party is from contention, the more likely that person will vote strategically for a viable party. This distance-from-contention factor is also referred to as the preferred party's having "No Chance" and has proven to be influential in other studies (Blais et al, 2001(Blais et al, , 2005Hale, 2020).…”

“…While the results were similar, the context influencing potential strategic votes differed in each election. In the 2015 election, the unpopularity of the Liberal Democrats left a number of their supporters with the decision of whether to “waste” their vote or to vote strategically (Hale, 2020). Meanwhile, smaller regional and fringe parties—including the Greens, Scottish National Party (SNP) and UK Independence Party (UKIP)—saw a large increase in support, and supporters were less incentivized to vote strategically 8…”