About Professor: Andrew C. Eggers
Abstract:
Strategic voting is an important explanation for aggregate political phenomena, but we know little about how strategic voting varies across types of voters. Are richer voters more strategic than poorer voters? Does strategic behavior vary with age, education, gender or political leaning? The answers may be important for assessing how well an electoral system represents different preferences in society. We introduce a new approach to measuring and comparing strategic voting across voters that can be broadly applied given appropriate survey data. In recent British elections, we find no difference in strategic voting by education level, but we do find that older voters are more strategic than younger voters, richer voters are more strategic than poorer voters, and left-leaning voters are more strategic than right-leaning voters. In the case of age and income, the difference in strategic voting exacerbates known inequalities in political participation.