Strategic Voting Under Conditions of Uncertainty: A Re-Evaluation of Duverger's Law

Abstract

Political scientists have long recognized that the number of parties in a country influences the way that interests are represented in that country. One explanation for the number of parties in a system relies on the idea of strategic voting, i.e. voters may not want to ‘waste a vote’ by voting for a third party. However, work in this area does not address the role of an important factor that may affect party systems through strategic voting: information. Without polls, how could voters know which parties were likely to win, and hence how to vote strategically? Using an agent-based model, this article assesses the role that information plays in shaping the party system through strategic voting. The results of this model demonstrate that, contrary to Duverger's Law, more than two parties may emerge in single-member plurality systems, even when all voters are strategic.

Electoral systems, ethnic cleavages and experience with democracy

“…This supports recent work emphasizing the importance of voters possessing accurate information for strategic voting to occur (e.g. Blais and Turgeon, 2004;Clough, 2007). Regardless, it seems that both voters and parties need rather considerable practice to begin to respond to institutional constraints as predicted in the literature focusing on advanced industrial democracies.…”

The Many Faces of Strategic Voting

“…Voter coordination thus depends on voter information, and the strategic voting model requires that voters clearly understand who is leading and who is trailing (e.g., Myatt 2007;Blais et al, this vol.). While most scholars implicitly assume that voters have ready access to such information, voters in mass elections are never certain of the electoral results and in some circumstances will not have access to objective information about who is trailing in the electoral race (e.g., Myatt and Fisher 2004;Clough 2007).…”

Poll-Confident Voters in Iterative Voting

“…For a particular citizen, they constitute a tool to have an idea of the population opinions, even if this vision can be biased. The social networks are a natural channel for acquiring information in context of uncertainty in voting (Chopra, Pacuit, and Parikh 2004;Clough 2007;Sina et al 2015;Tsang and Larson 2016).…”