Why So Little Strategic Voting in India?

• In Event: Electoral Politics and Voter Preferences in India

Abstract

Strategic voting lies at the heart of how political scientists understand the relationship between electoral rules and party systems. Central to the claim that restrictive electoral rules produce smaller party systems is the assumption that in single-member district plurality elections, voters frequently abandon candidates who are sure to lose, thereby converging largely on two leading candidates. While one strand of research has documented the existence of strategic voting, another strand of research has shown that, in some contexts, very few voters vote strategically.

We intervene in this literature by studying strategic voting in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a state of more than 200 million people. We do so based on an original survey of nearly 4,000 eligible voters conducted at the time of the state’s 2017 state legislative election. Contrary to some studies on India that have presumed reasonably widespread strategic voting (Chhibber and Murali 2006, Rozenas and Sadananan 2018), we first find that very few voters voted strategically, though a sizeable share of our sample preferred parties that would eventually come in third-place or worse in their constituencies. The absence of strategic voting holds regardless of how we measure strategic voting. Second, we further find that the absence of strategic voting is rooted in pervasively inaccurate perceptions of parties’ chances of winning. Across the board, voters perceive their preferred party as the most likely to win in their constituency, meaning that very few voters see any reason not to vote sincerely since they believe they are voting for a viable candidate. Finally, we uncover some evidence that the accuracy of voters’ perceptions increases in the (relatively few) constituencies where electoral volatility is low. These findings contrast with prior research that links strong partisanship to the decision not to vote strategically. Together, our findings suggest that we should expect very low levels of strategic voting across the developing world where public-opinion polling is scarce and unreliable and where electoral volatility tends to be high.

Authors

• Adam W. Ziegfeld, Temple University

• Oliver Heath, Royal Holloway