Entry Barriers to Political Markets and Strategic Voting

Resumen

Strategic voting has been extensively studied in mass elections. Many empirical papers that estimate strategic voting capture voter�s incentives to behave strategically with variables that describe constituency characteristics in the previous election. The use of lagged variables is potentially problematic as they do not reflect constituency incentives at the time voting decisions are made and also are likely to be correlated with current error terms, biasing the estimates. In this paper we suggest a new measure of strategic incentives suitable for proportional representation systems that avoids some of the problems associated with lagged variables. We employ the new measure to examine the extent of strategic behavior in the 2008 Spanish general election and find that it was around 2.4 per cent of the votes cast. We argue that this estimate is a conservative one as we control for elite mobilization in the constituencies, which is unusual in the literature on strategic voting that uses regression based methods.