UBC Political Science’s Democracy, Governance, Race and Justice Speaker Series presents a talk by Sarah Lachance, a PhD student in our department. Her talk is titled, “Campaign Effects on Strategic Voting for Minor Parties in Germany”
Please note: this event has been moved forward to 11:30 am on Wednesday, June 2.
There is a growing literature on strategic voting for minor parties in multiparty systems. However, there is no coherent account of the decision-making processes that differentiate the two main strategies: coalition insurance voting and compensational voting. The literature does not address the possibility of a hybrid strategy either. Moreover, most of the studies use endogenous independent variables that are likely to bias their results. The present study analyses strategic voting for minor parties by taking into account the type of campaign information that is required under different strategies and by using exogenous measures of the independent variables to allow valid causal inference. To do so, it uses data from the 2013 and 2017 GLES campaign-period surveys, polls, and an original dataset of tweets about policy posted by candidates during the campaign. The results show evidence of voters using a hybrid compensational/coalition insurance strategy in the 2013 German federal election and a pure compensational strategy in the 2017 German federal election. There is no evidence of pure coalition insurance voting in these elections. These findings reaffirm the view that the campaign plays a crucial role in the decision-making process of voters, in this case by allowing voters to target coalitions based on policy.
