Strategic voting and elite mobilization.

Resumen

Strategic voting has been attributed to the mobilization activities of the benefited party. In this paper we use data from the Spanish general elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008 and find that, after controlling for the mobilization efforts of political elites, strategic voting persists as a relevant phenomenon. We use the number of party campaign events at constituency level to incorporate mobilization activities in a multinomial probit model of vote choice. According to our estimation, about 3 per cent of Spanish voters behaved strategically across the elections studied. This result is interesting because it suggests that a part of strategic voting behavior is not induced by elite activity, but it is more plausibly an autonomous response of voters to the situation that confront in their constituencies.