Voter strategies with restricted choice menus

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 459-485

  Benoit, Kenneth ^a   Giannetti, Daniela ^b   Laver, Michael ^c  

^a TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

^b UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA   (Italy)

^c NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646892861     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S000712340600024X     Document Type: Review

References (76)

1. Gary W. Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
2. Michael Laver, 'The Logic of Plurality Voting in Multiparty Systems', in Manfred Holler, ed., The Logic of Multiparty Systems (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), pp. 359-70.
3. Morris P. Fiorina, Divided Government, 2nd edn (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1996).
4. Paul Allen Beck, Party Politics in America, 8th edn (New York: Longman, 1997).
5. Barry C. Burden and David C. Kimball, 'A New Approach to the Study of Ticket Splitting', American Political Science Review, 92 (1998), 533-44.
6. Kaare Strøm, Ian Budge and Michael Laver, 'Constraints on Cabinet Formation in Parliamentary Democracies', American Journal of Poltical Science, 38(1994), 303-35.
7. Matthew S. Shugart and Martin P. Wattenberg, eds, Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
8. Karen Cox and Leonard Schoppa, 'Interaction Effects in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: Theory and Evidence from Germany, Japan, and Italy', Comparative Political Studies, 35 (2002), 1027-53;
9. Thomas Gschwend, 'Ticket-splitting and Strategic Voting in Mixed Electoral Systems', MZES Working Paper No. 61 (Mannheim: Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung, 2003);
10. Jeffrey A. Karp, Jack Vowles, Susan A. Banducci and Todd Donovan, 'Strategic Voting, Party Activity, and Candidate Effects: Testing Explanations for Split Voting in New Zealand's New Mixed System', Electoral Studies, 21 (2002), 1-22.
11. Roy Pierce, 'Modelling Electoral Second Choices: Thwarted Voters in the United States, France, and Russia', Electoral Studies, 22 (2003), 265-85.
12. Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997).
13. For a brief but clear description, see Roberto D'Alimonte, 'Appendix: The Italian Elections of 1996', European Journal of Political Research, 34 (1998), 171-4.
14. Stephen Reed, 'Duverger's Law Is Working in Italy', Comparative Political Studies, 34 (2001), 312-27. The coalition arrangement was also in effect in 2001, although the coalitions were slightly renamed and consisted of slightly different parties. We have chosen to focus on the 1996 contest as it represents the first election following the 1993 reform where the coalition system was fully operative. While there is no reason why our analysis could not be applied to the 2001 elections, given the complexity of our empirical estimation we believe that including additional elections would unnecessarily burden this article.
15. The figure of 56 per cent is computed as the total number of voters who cast their PR votes for parties that did not also have candidates in that voter's district (21,182,440) divided by the total PR votes (37,494,964).
16. Bargaining among party leaders determines which party will offer the SMD candidate from each coalition, and this bargaining is conditional on two criteria. First, using a proportionality rule, SMD candidacies are allocated to parties according to their proportional vote share in previous local and national elections. Secondly, there is a careful rating of each electoral district into 'safe', 'marginal' and 'lost' - again on the basis of the results of the previous elections at the national and the local level (Aldo Di Virgilio, 'L'offerta elettorale: la politica della alleanze si istituzionalizza', in Roberto d'Alimonte and Stefano Bartolini, eds, Maggioritario finalmente? La transizione elettorale 1994-2001 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), to ensure an acceptable distribution of winnable seats among coalition members.
17. Marco Maraffi, 'Per che cosa si è votato il 13 maggio? Le mappe cognitive degli elettori italiani', in Mario Caciagli and Corbetta Piergiorgio, eds, Le ragioni dell'elettore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), pp. 301-38.
18. Erik S. Herron and Misa Nishikawa, 'Contamination Effects and the Number of Parties in Mixed-Superposition Electoral Systems', Electoral Studies, 20 (2001), 63-86.
19. Cox and Schoppa, 'Interaction Effects in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems', p. 1036.
20. ITANES 1996, Italian National Election Study, Istituto Cattaneo; it is available from http://www.cattaneo.org/english/dati/itanes.html
21. and also in an English-language version from http://socrates.berkeley. edu:7502/CAT/INES/1996/EN/Doc/hcb.htm.
22. The geographical identifiers in the ITANES can be matched with census data but not with election data. Variable q235 reports PR constituency, but not plurality district; the average constituency contains more than eighteen plurality districts. Variable q236 reports municipality, but municipalities do not correspond to electoral districts. For instance, one municipality (e.g. Rome) may contain numerous districts.
23. Michael Shin, 'The Politicization of Place in Italy', Political Geography, 20 (2001), 331-52;
24. John A. Agnew, Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and Society (London: Alien and Unwin, 1987).
25. Shin, 'The Politicization of Place in Italy' p. 333;
26. Michael E. Shin and John Agnew, 'The Geography of Party Replacement in Italy, 1987-1996', Political Geography, 21 (2001), 221-42.
27. Such as Burden and Kimball's application of King's method to the investigation of ticket splitting in the 1988 US elections (Burden and Kimball, 'A New Approach to the Study of Ticket Splitting');
28. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.
29. Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie, 'Ecological Inference and Entropy-Maximizing: An Alternative Procedure for Split-Ticket Voting', Political Analysis, 8 (2000), 333-45;
30. Thomas Gschwend, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie, 'Split-Ticket Patterns in Mixed-Member Proportional Election Systems: Estimates and Analyses of Their Spatial Variation at the German Federal Election, 1998', British Journal of Political Science, 33 (2003), 109-27. Entropy maximization would indeed offer an alternative to King's method for estimating our main quantities of interest, although the properties of King's estimates have been explored much further when used as second-stage regressors.
31. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.
32. Steven Voss, 'Using Ecological Inference for Contextual Research: When Aggregation Bias Is the Solution as Well as the Problem', in Gary King, Ori Rosen and Martin Tanner, eds, Ecological Inference: New Methodological Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 69-96;
33. Kenneth Benoit, Daniela Giannetti and Michael Laver, 'Multi-Party Split-Ticket Voting Estimation as an Ecological Inference Problem'
34. also in King, Rosen and Tanner, eds, Ecological Inference, pp. 333-50.
35. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957);
36. J. M. Enelow and M. Hinich, The Spatial Theory of Voting: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984);
37. J. M. Enelow and M. Hinich, eds, Advances in the Spatial Theory of Voting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
38. M. J. Hinich and M. C. Munger, Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994);
39. M. J. Hinich and M. C. Munger, Analytical Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press 1997).
40. Jay K. Dow, 'A Spatial Analysis of the 1989 Chilean Presidential Election', Electoral Studies, 17 (1998), 61-76.
41. Michael Laver and Norman Schofield, Multiparty Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990);
42. T. Iversen, 'Political Leadership and Representation in West European Democracies: A Test of Three Models of Voting', American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), 45-74;
43. Samuel Merrill III, 'Discriminating Between the Directional and Proximity Spatial Models of Electoral Competition', Electoral Studies, 14 (1995), 273-87;
44. Samuel Merrill III and Bernard Grofman, A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Spatial Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
45. Hinich and Munger, Ideology and the Theory of Political Choice, p. 46.
46. We are acutely aware that there are many ways to be 'strategic' in most choice situations, and that which we focus on here is but one. Nonetheless, we do maintain that sticking with the coalition of your first choice party, when a party from a rival coalition is closer to your own ideal point, is 'more strategic' than switching coalitions in this context.
47. Dean Lacy and Philip Paolino, 'Downsian Voting and the Separation of Powers', American Journal of Political Science, 42 (1998), 1180-99, p. 1197;
48. see also Kathleen Bawn, 'The Logic of Institutional Preferences: German Electoral Law as a Social Choice Outcome', American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 965-89.
49. Abstention from the SMD vote is also a possibility for frustrated voters, of course, although tests showed that there was no systematic pattern to the differences between total valid ballots in each context, and that the mean of these differences was statistically indistingiushable from zero.
50. Another possibility, of course, is that voters may have differing, possibly mistaken, perceptions of party platforms; or that policy preferences are multidimensional and that the choice table is more complicated than the unidimensional proximity model we implicitly assume in Figure 1. Finally, the lack of a perfect fit could be caused by measurement error, since our assumption that PR voting is sincere and that voters prefer the party whose position is closest to their ideal points does not provide a perfect measure of voter ideal points, only the party closest to the precise (unknown) voter ideal points.
51. We are aware that one of the parties in the 'Other' category, the Northern League, is more important than others both in terms of vote share and in terms of its strategic role in the formation of electoral coalitions. However, we also believe that this party is better understood in a two-dimensional model of Italian politics where our analysis uses more simplified one-dimensional spatial assumptions.
52. Cox, Making Votes Count, p. 72.
53. For computer-based content analysis and expert survey-based estimates of policy positions for Italian parties in 1996 which are highly correlated with those employed here, see Miranda de Vries, Daniela Giannetti and Lucy Mansergh, 'Estimating Policy Positions from the Computer Coding of Political Texts: Results from the Netherlands, Italy and Irish Government Declarations', in Michael Laver, ed., Estimating the Policy Positions of Political Actors (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 193-216.
54. Giacomo Sani and Paolo Segatti, 'Fratture sociali, orientamenti politici e voto: ieri e oggi', in D'Alimonte and Bartolini, eds, Maggioritario finalmente, pp. 249-81.
55. It just so happens that the two coalitions meet at the 0.04 policy position, but nothing in this analysis depends upon such an overlap.
56. Because the party mechanism for selecting SMD candidates, furthermore, is independent of the policy position of the rival coalition candidate, the ICM is also determined exogenously to potential coalition-splitting.
57. To see this for the PDS, note that a PDS supporter must have an ideal point to the left of the midpoint between the PDS and Prodi lists (- 0.65), placing her closer to the most left-wing Ulivo party (RC at - 1.22) than to the most left-wing Polo party (CCD-CDU at + 0.04). Strictly, there is a tiny area of potential AN support for which this might not be true, since the midpoint between AN and CCD-CDU is 0.610 and the midpoint between the most right-wing Ulivo party (Lista Dini at 0.04) and the most right-wing Polo party (Forza Italia at 1.27) is 0.655. Polo voters with ideal points between 0.610 and 0.655 on this economic-policy scale would marginally prefer CCD-CDU in an SMD contest between CCD-CDU and Forza Italia and have an 'expressive' incentive to be coalition splitters. But this zone is so small and so deeply within the realms of measurement error that we ignore it in this context.
58. Operationally, a higher score means a more right-wing ICM.
59. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.
60. The practice of using quantities estimated from El as dependent variables in second-stage regressions is known in the methodological literature as 'EI-R'. We are aware of and have tried to follow carefully the prescriptions of the most recent methodological literature on 'EI-R', using King's El estimates as dependent variables in second-stage regressions. First, we do not include as independent variables in EI-R any quantities not originally included as covariates in the first-stage EI estimation. This directly follows the advice of Christopher Adolph, Gary King, Michael C. Herron and Kenneth W. Shotts, 'A Consensus on Second Stage Analyses in Ecological Inference Models', Political Analysis, 11 (2003), 86-94.
61. Secondly, we employ weighted least squares (WLS) using the estimated El standard errors as weights, as recommended by Adolph et al. Finally, we conducted the specification test for inconsistency described in Michael C. Herron and Kenneth W. Schotts, 'Logical Inconsistency in El-Based Second-Stage Regressions', American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004) 172-83.
62. Our analysis passes the Herron and Schotts test, which does not necessarily indicate consistency, but fails an attempt to detect it. We recognize limitations in our approach but the robustness of our estimates across a variety of specifications, as well as our best attempt to address the methdological concerns associated with EI-R, lead us to believe our estimates are valid.
63. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy.
64. Lacy and Paolino, 'Downsian Voting and the Separation of Powers'.
65. See, for example, George Rabinowitz and Stuart Elaine Macdonald, 'A Directional Theory of Issue Voting', American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 93-121;
66. and Merrill and Grofman, A Unified Theory of Issue Voting. The application of our method to directional voting in the Italian context would, however, require significant new and 'hard to test' assumptions about voter perceptions of the status quo under a mixed-member system with party coalitions and coalition governments.
67. Stefano Bartolini, 'The Political Consequences of the Italian Mixed Electoral System (1994-2001)' (paper presented at the Conference on Elections and Democracy, Social Science Institute (ICS), University of Lisbon, February 2002).
68. Italian voting behaviour has frequently been considered to be based on non-rational or party-loyal motivations. See Chiaramonte Alessandro, 'L'effetto mancato della riforma maggioritaria: il voto strategico', in Roberto D'Alimonte and Stefano Bartolini, eds, Maggioritario per caso (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997).
69. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.
70. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem;
71. Ori Rosen, Wenxin Jiang, Gary King and Martin A. Tanner, 'Bayesian and Frequentist Inference for Ecological Inference: The R × C Case', Statistica Neerlandica, 55 (2001), 134-56.
72. For instance, see Ernesto Calvo and Marcelo Escolar, 'The Local Voter: A Geographically Weighted Approach to Ecological Inference', American Journal of Political Science, 47 (2003), 189-204.
73. Non-simultaneous elections add alarge additional level of complexity, not addressed here, which arises from the need to deal with turnover in the set of voters.
74. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.
75. King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem, p. 30.
76. b (see Figure A2).