Strategic voting and strategic abstention
Verlag: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
ISBN: 978-84-695-1574-7
Datum der Publikation: 2012
Seiten: 9
Kongress: Encuentro de Economía Pública (19. 2012. Santiago de Compostela)
Art: Konferenz-Beitrag
Zusammenfassung
The literature on strategic voting in mass elections finds that voters tend to favor large parties to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions elicit also strategic responses from abstainers that may be detrimental to large parties. We find that when ballot gains and losses from different kinds of instrumental reactions are taken into account, major parties still benefit from strategic behavior. This result originates from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the level of strategic behavior in the three most recent Spanish general elections.