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Strategic, sincere, and heuristic voting under four election rules: an experimental study

2010; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s00355-010-0448-7

1432-217X

Karine Van der Straeten, Jean‐François Laslier, Nicolas Sauger, André Blais,

Electoral Systems and Political Participation

We report on laboratory experiments on voting. In a setting where subjects have single-peaked preferences, we find that the rational choice theory provides very good predictions of actual individual behavior in one-round and approval voting elections but fares poorly in explaining vote choice under two-round elections. We conclude that voters behave strategically as far as strategic computations are not too demanding, in which case they rely on simple heuristics (under two-round voting) or they just vote sincerely (under single transferable vote).