1 Strategic voting in Swiss national elections:

This paper analyses the role of strategic considerations in the 2011 Swiss National Council elections. Citizens may be incited to defect from their preferred party when its chances of winning seats in their canton 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 examines the impact of both types of strategic incentives, and the degree to which they are conditional on one another. The paper 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 analyses show that both district-level and national-level incentives exerted a substantial impact on voters ’ choices