Dartmouth Events

Strategic voting is an important explanation for aggregate political phenomena, yet we know little about how strategic voting behavior varies across groups in society. Are right-leaning voters more strategic than left-leaning voters? Are men more strategic than women? Does strategic voting behavior vary with education or income? Addressing these questions requires measuring and controlling for the incentive to cast a tactical vote, but previous measures are ad hoc, limited in application, or both. We introduce a general approach that yields a one-dimensional measure of a voter's incentive to vote tactically. Applying this measure to recent British elections, we show that the propensity to vote strategically was higher among voters on the left and among women but was not related to education or age.