Measuring strategic voting: A two-step procedure

The paper proposes a two-step procedure to measure strategic voting in legislative elections. The approach uses voters' rank-order of preferences as well as their perceptions of the parties' chances of winning the election. It proceeds in two steps. The first step consists of identifying the pool of potential strategic voters, those who are faced with a strategic choice because their most preferred party (candidate) is perceived to have smaller chances of winning than their second choice. The second stage is confined to that group for whom strategic voting is a real option. We examine the actual vote decisions of that group, and relate them to the intensity of preferences and perceptions of the race. The methodology is applied to the 1988 Canadian election. We show that at least 6 per cent of the total electorate can be said to have voted strategically. We also show that the propensity to vote strategically increases when the intensity of preference for the first choice over the second decreases, when the second choice is perceived to have much better chances of winning than the first choice, and when the race between the second and third choices gets closer.