ABC of strategic voting

Strategic voting is a theory which argues that voters do not only vote for a candidate they want to win the most but that they also engage in strategic or tactical voting by voting for another candidate if they think it's more advantegous for their cause. There are many different theoretical approaches to strategic voting but they are all based on the idea of rational choice theory. According to the theory voters make rational decisions based on a set of preferences that they hold.

For instance if candidate A is a person's preferred candidate but he thinks A has no chance of winning against candidate B who the person dislikes, then the person can vote for candidate C if he thinks he has a chance of winning against B and thinks C is a lesser of two evils. Another example of strategic voting is from the US primaries where a person is certain that candidate A is going to win his party's nomination in the primaries. Then that person could change his registration (if needed) and vote in the other party's primary for a candidate C whom he thinks A could beat easier than the other rival party's candidates.

Strategic voting is a real phenomenom but it's unclear how widespread or impactful it really is. In two-party systems it can be however a very impactful factor. In this year's US presidential election there are many ”third-party candidates” or independents like Ralph Nader (independent), Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) or Cynthia McKinney (Green Party). Even if a voter would prefer one of these candidates over the main candidates he can be still very inclined to vote for either Obama or McCain simply because he doesn't want to ”waste his vote”. This a real concern for the voters because there are examples of third-party candidates impacting the election in a significant way. Ross Perot is a one example from 1992 and more recently Ralph Nader has been widely credited for Al Gore's loss in Florida in 2000 and therefore for Bush's election victory. Those kinds of events could very well disencourage voters to vote for less-known candidates from a fear of helping ”the worst” candidate to victory like many Nader supporters in 2000 noticed for their dismay.

Another way how strategic voting has been witnessed recently was in the main parties' presidential primaries. The Democrats had many heavy-weight candidates like Bill Richardson and Joe Biden but since all the media attention went primarily to Obama and Clinton and therefore they were significantly ahead in the early polls it disencouraged voters to vote for the ”long-shot” candidates. People have a tendency to want to think that their vote is important and that's why they flock to the main candidates. There are psychological reasons for that no doubt but many people also vote that way for rational reasons in order to help the better of the two to victory. That's strategic voting and it has been witnessed to happen many times in this election cycle already.