Decision period and Duverger's psychological effect in FPTP elections: Evidence from India

The psychological partisan effect of electoral systems: How ideology correlates with strategic voting

“…By doing so, they maximize their chance of influencing the outcome of the election, in the sense that they help prevent a party that they strongly dislike from being elected. Many empirical studies document the existence of strategic desertion in countries using single-member plurality systems, such as the United Kingdom (Alvarez et al, 2006; Eggers and Vivyan 2020; Fischer 2004; Niemi et al, 1992; Tromborg 2022), Canada (Blais et al, 2001; Daoust and Bol 2020; Eggers et al, 2022; Merolla and Stephenson 2007), and India (Choi, 2009; Heath and Zeigled, 2022; Rozenas and Sadanandan, 2018; Zhirnov, 2019). This behavior is particularly prevalent in those countries as, by definition, there is only one winner in each district and many parties who do not stand a chance to win.…”

Why So Little Strategic Voting in India?

“…India is also a country famous for frequently diverging from Duverger's Law and producing multiparty competition in spite of its electoral rules. Whereas prior research has relied on aggregate-level data to infer strategic voting in India (Rozenas and Sadanandan 2018;Zhirnov 2019;Ziegfeld 2021), ours is the first study to use individual-level data to examine the incidence of strategic voting. 2 Our data reveal that strategic voting is exceedingly rare, at 1% or lesslower than in studies already claiming to find low incidences of strategic voting.…”