Strategic Voting and Personality Traits
Whilst previous work on strategic voting emphasizes a number of factors with respect to voting rules and structural issues in the electoral process there is limited research with respect to its individual determinants. We offer a novel approach to that en
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Earlier work on strategic voting has largely relied upon utilitarian approaches (e.g., Cox 1997). Individuals are assumed to make decisions on the basis of their preferences amongst the available parties in the political spectrum as well as the perceived viability of these parties. Strategic voting is construed as the result of a rational calculation that requires voters to order their political preferences, and to seek information about the likely outcome of the election. In this study, we introduce a new approach to this research paradigm through the lens of personality traits that has been much studied particularly in political behavior and political psychology. In line with earlier related research (Blais and Labbe´ St-Vincent 2011; Gschwend 2007; Schoen and Schumann 2007), we propose and experimentally test whether one’s personality traits influence strategic voting behavior in a PR system with threshold. Simply defined, strategic voting is casting a vote for a party that is not the preferred one in order to make one’s vote count (Alvarez et al. 2006; Blais and Nadeau 1996; Blais et al. 2001; Cox 1997). There is a vast literature about the definition, measurement, and effects of strategic voting. Yet, the individual level determinants of strategic voting have been largely unexplored. In this chapter we examine behavioral differences in strategic voting through personality traits. Our approach aligns with the literature on personality and its effects on political behavior. There is a developing research strand on how personality traits could affect a number of domains central in political science. Among those scholarly research has shown that personality traits influence voting behavior (Duckitt and C. Erisen (*) Department of Political Science, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] A. Blais Department of Political Science, Universite´ de Montre´al, Montre´al, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Blais et al. (eds.), Voting Experiments, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40573-5_12
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Sibley 2016; Schoen and Schumann 2007) ideological orientations (Carney et al. 2008; Jost et al. 2003) political participation (Blais and Labbe´ St-Vincent 2011; Brandsta¨tter and Opp 2014; Gerber et al. 2011b, 2013b; Mondak et al. 2010), political attitudes (Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak and Halperin 2008), and many other aspects of political behavior (Caprara and Vecchione 2013; Mondak 2010). Equally important, economists (Almlund et al. 2011) and psychologists (Norman 1963; Eysenck 1991; Goldberg 1990; Costa and McCrae 1992) have been working on the constructs of personality and their distinct effects on various domains of behaviors and decisions, This earlier literature motivates us to further examine the effect of personality traits (the Big Five, in particular) in strategic voting. This chapter explores the link between personality and strategic voting in the following sequence. First, we provide a
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