The forthcoming article “Encouraging loyalty and defection: The impact of campaigns on tactical voting in Britain” by Lucas Núñez is summarized by the author below.
In multi-party elections using winner-take-all electoral systems, voters often face strong incentives to cast a tactical (or strategic) vote: a vote for a less-preferred party but with higher chances of winning. Tactical voting has received widespread attention in the voting behavior literature, predominantly focusing on measuring its extent. In recent United Kingdom General Elections, about a third of voters face such incentives, and between a third and half of them cast a tactical vote. While some correlates of tactical behavior are known, they are typically non-actionable; that is, not factors over which electoral participants have agency during the course of an electoral campaign. As such, our understanding of tactical/strategic voting behavior remains limited by a mostly passive view of electoral participants.
In this article I focus on one such actionable factor: parties’ direct outreach to voters. Using panel data for three separate UK General Elections, I estimate how contact by the different parties influences voters’ decision to cast a tactical vote, an effect separate and distinct from any changes in preferences that may simultaneously occur. That is, rather than measuring traditional conversion/persuasion effects, I measure the impact of parties’ outreach voters’ decision to remain loyal to or defect from their most preferred party.
I show that contact by a voter’s most preferred party encourages loyalty to the most preferred party, thus reducing tactical voting by about 4 percentage points. On the other hand, contact by a voter’s best alternative party (a less-liked party with higher chances of winning) encourages defection from the most preferred party, thus increasing tactical voting by about 5 percentage points. Additionally, in partial counterfactual estimates, I show that had parties not conducted any direct voter outreach, tactical voting overall would have decreased by about 2 percentage points.
These effects of campaigns on tactical voting stand in contrast to those in the persuasion literature in the United States, which typically finds null or minimal effects. However, there are important differences in context: the US is a two-party system with few cross-pressured voters; the UK, on the other hand, is a multi-party system with a significant number of cross-pressured voters and voters facing strong tactical incentives. My findings show that campaigns matter in the latter circumstances.
On the practical side, my findings suggest that candidates’ communications highlighting tactical/strategic situations in their constituencies, as parties in the UK often do, are a valuable strategy. On the normative side, the increase in tactical behavior could enhance voters’ political efficacy and help them elect a “less bad” government in the short term. In the long term, however, the overall tactical behavior encouraged by parties’ campaigns could prevent minority views from maturing into viable alternatives due to tactical defections.
About the Author: Lucas Núñez is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. Their research “Encouraging loyalty and defection: The impact of campaigns on tactical voting in Britain” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.