Influence of Distance on Strategic Voting

A voluminous literature shows that voters often vote strategically in order not to waste their votes. One manifestation of such behavior is when voters choose a more distant candidate when they believe that someone closer to them on an ideological scale has no chance of winning. The goal is to avoid truly distant candidates from winning by foregoing truly proximate but chanceless candidates. An open question is how far voters are willing to go in terms of compromising on the ideological dimension. How far from their ideal candidate can a candidate be such that voters still vote for the latter out of strategic considerations? In this paper, I develop a formal model outlining the link between strategic voting, ideological distance, and cues about the electoral prospects of various candidates. I then test the theory in an experiment, in which distance and electoral signals are systematically varied. This is done in the electoral context of a majority election in a single-member district. However, the paper speaks to a common phenomenon, whereby voters vote for large parties even when smaller parties on the same side of the ideological dimension would be closer to their ideal points.