Strategic voting and non-voting in Spanish elections

Abstract

The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008.

Allocating Campaign Effort in Spain: Evidence from Four General Elections

“…However, the distribution of delegates between provinces still correlates (+ 0.33 in the 2012 Party Convention) with the vote share in the previous election. 7 District magnitude is relevant not only because the district allocates more seats, but also because in larger districts strategic voting will be less likely (Lago 2008, García-Viñuela et al 2015). 8 Incumbent takes value 1 for the PP in 2000 and 2004 elections (0 otherwise), and value 1 for the PSOE in the 2008 and 2011 elections (0 otherwise).…”