Measuring and Explaining Strategic Voting in the German Electoral System

Contrary to Duvergers hypothesis, new theoretical and empirical insights demonstrate that strategic voting is a common feature of nearly every electoral system. The aim of this paper is to provide an operational definition of strategic voting in a given institutional context. In order to identify strategic voters we compare the voters complete preference ordering with his actual stated vote intention. Ordinal rank orderings of parties are achieved by pairwise comparisons conducted in a representative national sample. Relative effects of theoretically identified factors conducive to strategic voting are estimated by means of (nested multinomial) logit models