A Laboratory Experiment for Analyzing Electors’ Strategic Behavior in a First-Past-the-Post System

As it is well acknowledged that the electoral system is one of the fundamental rocks of our modern society, the behavior of electors engaged in a voting system is of the utmost importance. In this context, the goal of the study is to model the behavior of voters in a first-past-the-post system and to analyze its consequences on a party system. Among the assumptions of this study is Duverger’s law, which states that first-past-the-post systems favor a two-party system as the voters engage in tactical voting, choosing to vote in favor of a less preferred candidate who has better odds of winning. In order to test this assumption and to better analyze the occurrence of the strategic behavior, a laboratory experiment was created. A total of 120 persons participated in the study. An asymmetrical payoff function was created to value the voters’ preference intensity. As a result, it was observed that as voters got used to the voting system, they engaged in more tactical voting behavior in order to either maximize the gain or minimize the loss of their choice. Moreover, the iterations where voters started displaying tactical behavior featured a clustering around two main choices. The obtained results are consistent with both the empirical results of real-life elections and Duverger’s law. A further discussion regarding the change in voters’ choice completes the analysis on the strategic behavior.

Elections and durable governments in parliamentary governments

This paper provides a dynamic theory of a parliamentary government system with proportional-representation elections, policy-motivated parties and voters, and an endogenous status-quo policy. The theory identifies the representation of parties in parliament, the governments the parties form, the policies chosen by those governments, and the duration of the governments and their policies. Governments are majoritarian, government parties are equal partners, they and their policies are durable, voters elect minority parliaments in every period, and government policies provide concessions to centrist voters. If crises can occur, governments can fall, but a new government forms after the next election. The theory provides explanations for three empirical findings: equilibria consistent with Gamson’s law, an analog of Duverger’s law for proportional-representation electoral systems, and compensational voting where voters give the out party additional votes when an incumbent government is expected to continue in office.

Literacy, Information, and Party System Fragmentation in India

A rich theoretical literature argues that, in contradiction to Duverger’s law, the plurality voting rule can fail to produce two-party system when voters do not share their common information about the electoral situation. We present an empirical operationalization and a series of tests of this informational hypothesis in the case of India using constituency- and individual-level data. In highly illiterate constituencies where access to information and information sharing among voters is low, voters often fail to coordinate on the two most viable parties. In highly literate constituencies, voters are far more successful at avoiding vote-wasting—in line with the informational hypothesis. At a microlevel, these aggregate-level patterns are driven by the interaction of individual information and the informational context: In dense informational environments, even low-information voters can successfully identify viable parties and vote for them, but in sparse informational environments, individual access to information is essential for successful strategic voting.

Election Data and Levels of Analysis

This chapter discusses the advantages, but also challenges, of having election data at various levels of analysis. Fortunately, election results across the world are being collected and organized into useable datasets at various levels of analysis, including voting machines, polling stations, precincts, villages, constituencies, provinces or states, regions, and countries. The author uses the literature on Duverger’s law as an example of a research area that has benefited from new sources of data and from research drawing upon those data at multiple levels of analysis. The chapter concludes that data science and new sources of data will continue to transform political science, including the study of elections.