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Strategic Votes and Sincere Counterfactuals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2017

Alaitz Artabe  and
Javier Gardeazabal
Alaitz Artabe
Affiliation:
Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico II, Universidad del País Vasco, Lehendakari Aguirre 83, 48015 Bilbao, Spain. e-mail: alaitz.artabe@ehu.es
Javier Gardeazabal*
Affiliation:
Departamento de Fundamentos del Análisis Económico II, Universidad del País Vasco, Lehendakari Aguirre 83, 48015 Bilbao, Spain
*
e-mail: javier.gardeazabal@ehu.es (corresponding author)
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Abstract

The random utility model (RUM) of voting behavior can account for strategic voting by making use of proxy indicators that measure voter incentives to vote strategically. The contribution of this article is to propose a new method to estimate the RUM in the presence of strategic voters, without having to construct proxy measures of strategic voting incentives. Our method can be used to infer the counterfactual sincere vote of those who vote strategically and provides an estimate of the size of strategic voting. We illustrate the procedure using post-electoral survey data from Spain. Our calculations indicate that strategic voting in Spain is about 2.19%.

Type
Research Article
Information
Political Analysis , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014 , pp. 243 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 

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Footnotes

Authors' note: We would like to thank Elena del Rey, Beatriz Gonzalez Lopez-Valcarcel, Thomas Gschwend, Annick Laruelle, Stefan Napel, Federico Valenciano, Donald Wittman, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of the Basque Country, University of California—Santa Cruz, and the Simposio de la Asociación Española de Economía 2011 in Malaga. Replication materials are available in the Political Analysis Dataverse dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/22991.

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