Do voters make active attempts to change election results by placing strategic votes? While existing work by Abramson et al. or Alvarez and Nagler has largely corroborated the presence of strategic voting in the UK, there is still little empirical evidence of such voting behaviour occurring outside the UK, in countries with less clear-cut party systems and different electoral rules. A unique arrangement of electoral rules in the Czech Republic has allowed us to create a quasi-experimental design with a robust test for strategic behaviour. By using Bayesian modelling of vote combinations within electoral precincts, we are able to estimate the behaviour of individual voters in two simultaneous elections with different rules, where the theory of strategic voting predicts vote-splitting based on a perceived chance to win. We are thus able to evaluate one of the fundamental propositions of strategic voting literature in a heretofore unexplored setting.
