Strategic Voting Under Seat-Maximizing and Policy-Maximizing Incentives

This paper analyses the impact of seat-maximizing and policy-maximizing incentives on strategic voting. Citizens may be incited to defect from their preferred party when its chances of winning a seat in their electoral district are low. Also, following the literature on coalition-directed voting, they may prefer supporting a more extreme party, which could bring the expected government position closer to their preferred location. This article develops a unified voting choice model which combines both types of incentives and which shows how strategic voting should be influenced by the proportionality of the electoral system and by citizens' expectations about electoral results. It improves on the existing literature in three ways: by showing that the effects of policy-maximizing incentives are conditional on party viability; by taking into account voters’ expectations about the electoral results, at both the district and national levels; and by considering more precise scenarios about the expected changes in the government composition. The empirical analysis focuses on the case of the 2011 Swiss elections. While based on a single election, this design takes advantage of the strong variation in electoral district magnitude. This allows comparing citizens who face different incentives to defect from their preferred party, while keeping constant the general characteristics of the partisan and institutional framework. The results show that both district-level and national-level incentives exert a substantial impact on voters’ choices.