Coalitions, Coordination and Electoral Choice: A Lab Experimental Study of Strategic Voting

When a voter chooses between large and small parties in a coalition, strategic reasons may be the tie-breaker. “Strategic voting” is often defined as a vote for another party than one’s most preferred one with the intention to affect the outcome of the election. The presence of coalitions can sometimes be argued to lead to less strategic voting, whereas others claim that coalitions create more strategic incentives. This chapter looks at how the relative strength of parties in a coalition affect voters’ tendency to vote strategically. Comparing two contexts with more or less uncertainty about which parties will make it to the parliament, the findings are that voters cast strategic votes for small parties to a greater extent when there are substantial size differences between the coalition parties. Individual expectations of parties’ likelihood of success are crucial to the decision making.