Does Proportional Representation End Strategic Voting? Yes and No
One of the reasons many people give for supporting proportional representation is that it will end strategic voting. Because with PR, we can "vote with our hearts" rather than "vote for the lesser evil." Does proportional representation achieve that? Let's investigate.
Two important things to understand before we can answer that question:
1) Proportional representation is not one system. It's a principle (30% vote = 30% seats) and a family of systems which aim to achieve that goal with different mechanics.
2) It all depends what you mean by strategic voting. When we think of strategic voting in Canada, what comes to mind is this: "If I live in a swing riding, I must vote for someone I don't really want in order to prevent an MP I can't stand from winning the riding. If I vote for my sincere first choice instead I could then help "split the vote", the worst candidate may be elected, and their party could form a 39% majority." The good news is: All proportional systems on the table for Canada end that kind of strategic voting. A Broader Definition of Strategic Voting First-past-the-post is a pretty blunt instrument for electing a government. For the voter, it's a bit like swinging a hammer in the air and hoping you hit something. Most of us don't. Strategic voting campaigns in this system are blunt instruments, too. Basically, try to coordinate enough people in the swing ridings to swing their hammers in the same direction to stop the worst possible outcome. It's a huge effort. You never know for sure if it's going to work, or what the unintended effects might be. Both PR-STV and MMP give voters much greater ability to influence an election - they are much more nuanced tools. So strategic voting efforts become more nuanced, too. To answer the question of whether people vote strategically with PR, let's take a broader definition of strategic voting: "Voting for a party or candidate that isn't your first choice." This is the kind of strategic voting that still occurs in proportional systems. Here's how. Mixed Member Proportional and Strategic Voting
With MMP, about 2/3 of the MPs are still elected in single member, winner-take-all ridings. The other 1/3 of MPs are elected from open, regional lists. That's why it's called "mixed" - it's a mix of the mechanics of first-past-the-post and list PR. Whenever you have single member, winner-take-all races built into a system, you will have some degree of strategic voting.
As a voter using MMP, you tick two boxes - one for a local MP, and one for a regional MP. A few things can happen:
1) You may help elect a local MP with the FPTP ballot but no regional MP from the party list
2) You may help elect a regional MP but not a local MP
3) You may help elect a local MP AND a regional MP
4) You may help elect nobody MMP in Scotland and Strategic Voting
In the 2011 election in Scotland (which uses MMP with regional lists) the Scottish National Party (SNP) got 44% of the regional vote (the party vote) but formed a majority government (53% of the seats). The overall results were distorted because the SNP won so many local riding seats. In the 2016 Scottish election, strategic voting campaigns in support of Scottish independence were telling SNP voters not to bother casting regional votes for SNP - they would win so many local seats again that they didn't need regional votes and so those votes wouldn't count. SNP voters were advised to vote SNP in the local riding to re-elect the local SNP MP, then vote GREEN on the regional ballot so the Greens would win more seats. The Greens also support Scottish independence, so between the SNP and the Greens, that would allow a pro-Independence majority to be elected. And those voters would have their votes count on both sides of the ballot. From one blog: "Given that it is inevitable that the SNP are going to lose a lot of their list seats as a result of winning even more handsomely in the constituency seats, it makes sense for pro-Independence voters to lend their "list" vote to the Scottish Greens in order to prevent as many "list" seats as possible from being soaked up by the anti-Independence parties."
Pro-union groups on the other side advised a different strategy, to try to stop the nationalist parties from forming a majority:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11444202/New-pro-Union-campaign-to-identify-seats-where-tactical-voting-could-defeat-SNP.html
The SNP fell two seats short of a majority, but in combination with the Green seats, the nationalist forces now have a majority. How much of that was due to the success of "strategic voting", I don't know. The point is, these kind of coordinated strategies do play a role in how people vote with MMP.
Bottom Line on MMP and Strategic Voting With a significant winner-take-all component maintained, some people do vote strategically - to try to make the votes on both sides of their ballots count, or to achieve some objective in terms of what coalition forms the government. However, this is a proportional system and the objectives of moderate PR are met: Governments are usually formed by parties representing a majority of voters, or closer to it than we see in Canada, and most voters are able to cast a vote that helps elect representation from the party of their choice. List PR in Sweden and Strategic Voting Sweden uses a regional open list PR system. The threshold for a party to qualify for seats is 4%. After the results come in, if the overall legislature still isn't quite proportional, further MPs from the open party lists are elected to "adjustment seats" in each region to achieve excellent overall proportionality (similar to the hybrid model for Canada described here). With a proportional open list system (no winner-take-all component) and a low threshold (4%), how can strategic voting occur here? Yet it does. As new research on strategic voting in Sweden shows, it's quite common, even effective.
Voters choose parties who are not their first choice for the following reasons: 1) Their preferred party is too small and not likely to meet the 4% threshold and they don't want to "waste their vote" (similar to reasons people vote strategically in winner-take-all systems) 2) They hope for a certain coalition and want to ensure that a smaller party partner in the coalition meets the threshold so that coalition happens (what Freden calls "threshold insurance voting") This second kind of strategic voting was quite successful in the 2010 Swedish election. Most of the voters for the Christian Democrats preferred the larger Moderate Party but voted for the smaller party to ensure a centre-right coalition - a strategy which was encouraged by the Moderate Party leadership.
Bottom line on Regional Open List PR and Strategic Voting in Sweden
Like with MMP, voters do not always choose their sincere first choice party. Voting for a smaller party to make a certain coalition formation more likely is common.
Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV)
With PR-STV, used in Ireland and three Australian territories, voters elect a small team of local MPs using a ranked ballot. Nobody has yet convinced me that strategic voting is either common or successful with PR-STV. Think of the immense amount of effort that went into the "Vote Together" strategic voting campaign in the last Canadian election, targeted at just a few swing ridings. The strategy was: a) determine with a high degree of probability through repeated local polling which single candidate in a one-winner riding was best placed to beat the Conservative b) communicate that one piece of information about who to vote for to enough voters in those ridings to swing the outcome Now imagine the local riding is not one seat, but a 5 seat multi-member district where each party is running 1-3 candidates. Voters can rank their choices in any order and across party lines. To get one of the five seats, an individual candidate needs a certain number of votes. If he/she gets more votes than is needed to win the seat, the extra votes are transferred to the second choices of those voters. If nobody meets the quota for a seat, the last candidate is eliminated and the second choices of those voters are transferred. Now voters don't have to do any of this - all they have to do is mark 1,2,3 - it's quite user-friendly. They'll see which MPs were elected and that the results were proportional.
But imagine trying to design a strategic voting campaign which depends on accurate predictions of which candidates will have surpluses, be eliminated first or second, the nuanced preferences of each voter... it's almost impossible. Parties do employ strategies with STV to maximize the number of seats they win in each riding (and therefore produce more party-proportional results), such as deciding how many candidates to run in each riding (usually one more than they can hope to win seats). Each candidate from party A may ask voters in that district to choose them first and one of their running-mate second. But as these articles point out, it's pretty hard to vote strategically or plan a coordinated strategic voting campaign with PR-STV:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.127.97 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issues_affecting_the_single_transferable_vote#Tactical_voting PR and Strategic Voting In Summary Human beings are strategic. They will attempt to use the mechanics of whatever electoral system they have to get the results they want. In proportional systems some voters will choose a party that is not their first choice to achieve some other objective they desire, such as ensuring a smaller party qualifies for seats, to support the formation of a particular coalition, or to give a party with strength on a particular policy issue more seats in a coalition. Different types of proportional systems offer different ways of voting strategically and are susceptible to strategic voting to different degrees. But in general, any proportional system for Canada means the end of strategic voting as we know it - having to plug your nose and vote for someone you don't want to prevent a party you dislike from forming a majority government. From where I'm sitting, the kinds of strategic voting employed by voters in countries with proportional representation, and the goals of those kinds of strategic voting, sound like heaven on earth compared to the blunt tool and demoralizing choices facing many Canadian voters in each first-past-the-post election.
