Abstract
The chapter examines perceptions of candidate viability in a series of voting experiments conducted in Lille, Montreal, and Paris. We show that: participants in these experiments are able to distinguish viable and non-viable candidates; these perceptions become clearer over time; and they affect vote choice. Moreover, we show that voters’ behavior is unaffected by whether they are asked (or not) about their perceptions of candidates’ chances of winning. We conclude that, for studying in details the determinants of voters’ choices, there is much to be gained in measuring, in a simple and direct manner, participants’ perceptions in voting experiments.
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Notes
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Each group also had four successive elections under a runoff system, and in some groups, one last series of election were held under the alternative vote or approval voting. We confine ourselves to one round plurality elections, where strategic voting is much simpler to describe, and simply consists in deserting non-viable candidates. See Van der Straeten et al. (2010) for a discussion of strategic voting under the other voting rules.
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This question appears on the top portion of their ballot paper. The bottom end of the ballot paper lists the five candidates, and people are asked to vote for one of them.
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In the groups with 63 subjects, three subjects held each position.
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In Montreal and Paris, subjects are students (from all fields) recruited from subject pools (subject pool from the CIRANO experimental economics laboratory in Montreal, and from the Laboratoire d’économie expérimentale de Paris in Paris). In Lille, the experiments took place in classrooms, during a first year course in political science. Tests on the variants of this protocol (location and subjects pools) are provided in Sauger et al. (2012) and show that they have little impact.
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There are 1676 observations (individual votes) in the sessions with the chance question. We drop the observations where the subject did not answer the question about the chances of winning of the different candidates. There were 20 such cases (3 in the first election, 7 in the second, 4 in the third and 6 in the fourth). We are therefore left with the 1656 observations in Table 2.
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Compared to Table 2, two observations were dropped because the participant gave a score of 0 to every candidate.
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To take into account the non-independence of the cases in the data structure, all the OLS and Conditional Logit were conducted using clusters at the individual level at the election level, or no cluster at all. The conclusions are the same.
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The impact of the two variables can be compared because both range from 0 to 1. We have also performed regressions for perceptions of viability in the third and fourth elections in which we take into account results of all previous elections, not only the immediately preceding one (as in Table 5). The results indicate that voters take into account the results of all previous elections though they pay more attention to the most recent. Taking into account these other elections does not affect the coefficients attached to G. Finally, we have tested for potential non-linear or interaction effects between G and R t – 1. We found a significant (though weak) interaction effect only in the second election. The simple linear additive model appears quite satisfactory.
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We also tested for interaction effects between G and V. The interaction effect proved to be significant only in the fourth election and including the interaction variable increased the pseudo R-squared by less than .01. Here again, the simple additive model is satisfactory.
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In two groups it was candidate C and in the third group it was candidate B.
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By the time of the fourth election, the correlation between previous results and perceived viability is getting stronger (see Table 5), and so it becomes more difficult to sort out the specific effect of each variable.
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Notice that we do not know the cause of this misperception. In may be pure cognitive difficulty but it may be also “justification statement” from voters who did vote for non-viable candidates and found it difficult to admit they were wrong. In that case the direction of causality would be reversed.
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Labbé St-Vincent, S., Blais, A., Foucault, M., Laslier, JF., Sauger, N., Van der Straeten, K. (2016). Measuring Perceptions of Candidate Viability in Voting Experiments. In: Blais, A., Laslier, JF., Van der Straeten, K. (eds) Voting Experiments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40573-5_15
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