Tactical Voting

[andrewducker]

communicator pointed me at this article on tactical voting under AV.

Now, I know that tactical voting is _possible_ under AV - but it looks to me like it would be a lot less common than it is under FPTP. Does anyone have any figures (or failing that anecdata) on how often it happens in Australia, or other places where it's used?

Comments

[birguslatro]

I don't know about tactical voting in Australia, but I've heard that due to voting being compulsory, one worry is the people who just number all the candidates in the order they appear on the voting form. Still, those types of voters are less likely to invalidate their vote by accidentally entering two '4's, right?

You won't have the first problem though - just the second.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I don't have a link for this, just a recollection of an article in an academic journal I remember reading for a Politics essay at university, but many people (myself included) would argue that tactical voting is much less common than is widely thought anyway.

This is because of a misunderstanding of why people vote. Most people would answer the question "Why do people vote?" by saying something along the lines of "To affect the result of elections". However, when you look at the numbers, and assume that a large enough body of people tends towards rational behaviour, this doesn't make sense. In a constituency of let's say 60,000 voters, which in itself is one of roughly 600 constituencies, the chance that any one individual makes a material impact on the result of an election is infinitesimal. In fact, for most people, it would be offset by the effort of getting to the polling station.

So why do people vote? The answer is that they want to belong. They want to identify with a political movement or party. They want to feel like they were part of the movement that "voted Labour out of office after thirteen wasted years" or "voted for the first black president" or whatever. That psychological motivation far outweighs any thought that they as an individual voter might materially affect the outcome of the election.

And when you think about voter motivation in those terms, then tactical voting is less of an issue.

What you may get under AV is a situation where voters want to identify with a particular party, but also want to identify with "anyone but..." another. So I think that many voters will have a good idea of their first choice, and a good idea of the parties they will not rank, and a vague idea of the parties they don't mind so much. Under this logic, AV does not help the small parties so much as the inoffensive ones. It would therefore have something of a bias towards centrist parties.

[andrewducker]

I _want_ to vote to make a point about how I want the country to be. I want it to be known that I want the government to be of type X.

I have, in the past, voted to get party Y out of power. But I stopped doing that, because it felt horribly short term.

And yes, AV doesn't help small extremist parties, because nobody goes to them with their second vote. It helps centrist ones.

[andrewducker]

Also, one could argue that FPTP tends to produce that approach - when you're basic option in any vote is "party A or party B" then you'll vote to keep out the one you don't like. It means that most votes will be negative ones, rather than positive ones. If you have a true choice then you can be more discerning and send a positive signal about what party actually closely matches your choices.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree. It would be rare for most people to powerfully agree with a specific party, since (excepting party loyalists and members) most parties will manage to have at least one policy that each voter will disagree with. It is, however, much easier for a party to massively offend a voter by virtue of one or some policies, even if the voter agrees with other policies.

[andrewducker]

I think that also makes things easier for newspapers - if there are two parties then you can just rant about how awful the other people are. If there are lots of parties then you need to actually find likeable things about the one you want to promote.

[rwrylsin.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth anecdotaly;

In Aus, tactical voting is generally of the form "I'll vote X in the lower house, but Y in the upper house to keep them honest", which has a fairly strong tradition here now.

Sometimes "I'll vote party X because I know this is a safe Y seat and they won't win, but I want Y to know I'm not entirely pleased with them".
Recently there was a lot of "X and Y are both useless, I'll vote Z only because they have no hope of winning and maybe it'll scare the others into behaving better".

But having said that, what I've seen in the polling booths suggests that when it comes to actually filling in the paper, most people don't do it. Maybe 5-10% (wild guess, varies according to specific election details) will deliberately vote for a different party in the upper house, but voting "1" for someone you don't actually favour is pretty rare.

[andrewducker]

Thanks - that is interesting.