1 Strategic voting in Swiss national elections:

This paper analyses the impact of district-level and national-level incentives on strategic voting. Citizens may be incited to defect from their preferred party when its chances of winning seats in their electoral district are low. Also, following the compensatory voting logic, they may prefer supporting a more extreme party, which could bring the expected government position closer to their preferred location. This paper develops a voting choice model that combines both types of incentives and that suggest that their effects are conditional on one another. The paper also improves on the existing literature on compensatory voting by offering a more precise account of the type and likelihood of changes in the composition of the government. The analysis is based on the 2011 election of the Swiss National Council. The analyses show that both district-level and national-level incentives exert a substantial impact on voters ’ choices