Strategic voting is important to understand the nature of party competition in first-past-the-post (FPTP) democracies. In Canada, voters tend to vote for their second preferred party when they believe that their preferred option has no chance of winning in their district. In turn, this reinforces the tendency of the FPTP electoral system to create a two-party system (Gidengil et al. 2012). However, to date, we still know very little about strategic voting in Canadian provincial elections. In this paper, we compare the 2011 Ontario and 2012 Quebec elections. Quebec and Ontario provincial political systems share many features, but they differ regarding party competition. The number of competing parties and the number of cleavages are larger in Quebec. However, we find that strategic voting is as common in both provinces and that the determinants are similar. Theses results are robust to various specifications and controls.
