Title: Government Formation and Strategic Voting in Multi-Party Systems: Voting for Coalitions in the Netherlands
Abstract: Voters may have different strategic reasons to vote for a party that is not their favourite. The best known form of strategic voting takes place in major itarian electoral systems, where citizens may decide to not waste their vote by supporting a cand idate that has no chance of winning the constituency seat. This incentive to vote strategic ally is absent in proportional systems with large district magnitudes. We argue that in multi-party s ystems another form of strategic voting takes place, as considerations about future government co alitions may stimulate citizens to vote strategically. We evaluate this proposition on the basis of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study 2006, which contained a novel series of survey item s aimed at identifying such considerations. The results suggest that Dutch voters did indeed vo te strategically aiming to influence government formation. The key finding is that if voters did no t conceive of their favourite party as taking part in the coalition they would like to see formed afte r the election, they deflected and voted for one of the major parties, as these were likely to take part in this coalition. Voters’ estimates of the probability of particular coalitions forming, on th e other hand, had virtually no impact.
Publication Year: 2008
Publication Date: 2008-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 3
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