Government Formation and Strategic Voting in Multi-Party Systems:Voting for Coalitions in the Netherlands

Voters may have different strategic reasons to vote for a party that is not their favourite. The best known form of strategic voting takes place in majoritarian electoral systems, where citizens may decide to not waste their vote by supporting a candidate that has no chance of winning the constituency seat. This incentive to vote strategically is absent in proportional systems with large district magnitudes. We argue that in multi-party systems another form of strategic voting takes place, as considerations about future government coalitions may stimulate citizens to vote strategically. We evaluate this proposition on the basis of the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study 2006, which contained a novel series of survey items aimed at identifying such considerations. The results suggest that Dutch voters did indeed vote strategically aiming to influence government formation. The key finding is that if voters did not conceive of their favourite party as taking part in the coalition they would like to see formed after the election, they deflected and voted for one of the major parties, as these were likely to take part in this coalition. Voters ’ estimates of the probability of particular coalitions forming, on the other hand, had virtually no impact