The Conditional Effect of District Magnitude on Compensatory Voting

This paper considers the interdependencies between ‘policy balancing’, where voters decide to support a party which is more extreme than their own preference and ‘traditional ’ strategic voting, where voters avoids ‘wasting ’ their vote by supporting a party with weak electoral chances. Literature on policy balancing has not sufficiently accounted for the mutual relationships between the two forms of strategic voting. The incentives for policy balancing and the incentives for supporting a viable party may cancel each other out. This will happen if the more extreme alternative that should be preferred from the point of view of policy balancing is not a viable party in a voter’s electoral district. This paper examines these conditional effects in the 2007 Swiss federal elections. This country is ideally suited for this research question, as it offers both strong incentives for policy balancing (grand coalition) and strong variation across electoral districts in the incentives for traditional strategic voting (PR elections with varying district magnitude). While the incentives for policy balancing are the same for all citizens, the frequency of policy balancing should vary across electoral districts and be higher in the large ones