Strategic adaptation to new electoral systems

Abstract

How quickly, to what extent and under what conditions do voters and elites adapt to new electoral institutions in order to not waste their votes and effort on hopeless competitors? A latent‐curve model of strategic adaptation is developed and fitted to district‐level election data from Spain. The extent of strategic adaptation is generally found to vary with the strength of the electoral system. However, grave ethnic tensions are demonstrated to seriously retard adaptation even under favourable institutional conditions.

Determining the Effect of Strategic Voting on Election Results

“…Prior work has stressed the role of electoral histories (e.g. Cox (), Gschwend (), Reed () and Selb ()) and the (un‐)availability of public opinion polls for voter co‐ordination in simple plurality elections (e.g. Cox () and Myatt ()).…”

“…(), Fey (), Fieldhouse et al . (), Gschwend (), Johnston and Pattie (), Kiewiet (), Myatt and Fisher (), Norris (), Selb () and Reed ()).…”

The Many Faces of Strategic Voting

“…The 2016 election in Spain offers an interesting scenario for examining the rationales behind them. Proportional representation (PR) elections in Spain have given rise to a considerable amount of district-level strategic voting since the 1970s Gunther 1989;Lago 2008Lago , 2012Selb 2012). As most of the districts select five or fewer seats, there is room for strategic voting to affect the allocation of seats among parties.…”

“…In the eleven elections held from 1977 to 2011, the best third-party results were the IU's 10.64% of the votes and 21 seats in 1996. Not surprisingly, a substantial body of research has provided robust evidence of strategic voting in small districts, in particular among IU supporters (García Viñuela and Artés 2012;Gunther 1989;Lago 2008Lago , 2012Selb 2012). In Gunther's words (1989,842), This prima facie case for the presence of sophisticated voting is strongly corroborated when the voting behavior of these respon-dents is broken down by province in accord with the number of deputies sent to the Cortes from each district.…”

“…Yet doubts remain about the extent to which it is reasonable to expect that such information is relevant for a significant number of voters. In addition to the fact that time erodes voters' memories, parties' popularity may have changed substantially since the last election (Selb 2012), and new candidates may have entered the electoral competition (Crisp, Potter, and Lee 2012). Polls can serve as a coordination signal, providing voters with results and trends based on pre-election polls (Forsythe et al 1993;).…”