Today's elections in the UK raise one of the classic questions in political psychology: how informed are voters, and do they have enough information to cast "sophisticated" votes?
Some of the research on these questions has focused on whether voters have enough information to cast "strategic" or "tactical" ballots in situations where there are multiple candidates or parties contending for office.
Think of it this way, using the UK elections as an example: Let's say that you are a voter who favors Labour, you like the Liberal Democrats (but not as much as Labour), and you really don't like the Conservatives. But in your area, the Labour party is not doing well --- instead it is a fight between the Conservatives and Lib Dems for the local seat. In this situation, what should a voter do?
Political scientists are torn on this question. Some, especially those from the "rational choice" school, argue that in situations like these voters will cast a "strategic" or "tactical" ballot. In the example above, the voter would vote for their second-best option, the Lib Dems, to keep their least favored outcome (a Conservative victory) from happening. But to vote in such a way, the voter needs to know what the likely electoral outcome is in their area, and of course they need to know how they personally rank the three parties. This requires that voters be pretty well informed.
I've written a couple of academic papers on this very subject, including two that study British elections (published in the British Journal of Political Science in 2000 and Electoral Studies in 2006), and one that looked at these questions in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall question (published in the British Journal of Political Science in 2009). This research shows that some voters cast "tactical" or "strategic" ballots, but that the exact rate of "tactical" voting is dependent on a variety of factors and that it varies across elections. Furthermore, the study of the 2003 California gubernatorial recall showed that most voters in that election could rank the top candidates in a way that they could vote "strategically," and we found that some did cast "strategic" votes.
But others are skeptical, and argue that voters typically don't have the necessary information to be able to cast ballots this way. For example, Alexander Schuessler argued in his book, A Logic of Expressive Choice (2000), that voters may not be casting their ballots to influence the overall outcome, but so that they can express their preferences and opinions. Expressive voters don't have to be well informed about the possible outcomes of elections, nor do they need to be able to rank all of their potential choices in a rigorous manner.
An important question in this debate has been how a typical voter might get the necessary information on how the candidates or parties are doing in their area, so that they could vote "tactically." I've heard stories of party leaders telling voters in a particular area how to vote "tactically."
In today's UK elections, there is an interesting twist -- an application of new technologies that provides information that will help voters to vote "tactically." The Guardian has published an online "tactical voting guide", that actually lets voters look up data from their area to determine how they might best vote tactically. If many voters use an online tool like this, we might see the rate of "tactical" voting in today's election soar well above what has been estimated in past elections.
Whether this influences the number of people who cast "tactical" ballots today is not clear, but it is clear that in a close election like today's, such "tactical" ballots might determine how many seats each party gets in the election. We'll know much more after the election (my colleague Rod Kiewiet and I have been gathering innovative survey data recently in the UK to study this question), but it'll be interesting to watch as results come in to see whether "tactical" ballots are important in today's election.
