Strategic and Sincere Voting in Multi-Level Systems

This chapter develops and tests hypotheses about the implications of different kinds of strategic behaviour on the part of voters at the individual, regional, and party levels. Whereas some voters try to avoid wasting their vote on unviable parties, others deviate from their preferred small party to make it more likely that the more preferred of the large parties can assume the prime ministership in a potential government. Some voters deviate from their most preferred party in order to balance the overall direction of policies by having ideologically different governments at different levels of governance. Overall, the chapter cautions against a naïve approach that assumes that voters are voting strategically if they vote for different parties in different levels of election, because the electoral context, election campaigns, the number and the type of parties that compete in each election are different.