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Expressive and Strategic Behavior in Legislative Elections in Argentina

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Abstract

In this paper I study strategic voting behavior in the Argentine Senate election for the City of Buenos Aires in 2013. I estimate and analyze the voter transition matrix between the primary and general elections using a Bayesian hierarchical model for ecological inference, utilizing a rich data set of ballot box data. The results show that strategic behavior is not widespread among the electorate in Buenos Aires. In particular, at least 75 % of voters who had the opportunity to avoid vote wasting by behaving strategically did not. I also find high levels of vote wasting when analyzing other provinces during the same election cycle. These results suggest that these electorates might be composed of a mixture of voters with strategic and expressive motivations, where the expressive factions dominate.

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Notes

  1. See Hamlin and Jennings (2011) for a review of the foundations of expressive voting behavior.

  2. There is a large literature dealing with voter turnout and it’s determinants. See, for example, Gerber et al. (2014), Gerber et al. (2013), Gerber and Green (2000), Beys (2006), Ashworth and Clinton (2007).

  3. For analyses of strategic behavior in the United States and United Kingdom see, for example, Johnston and Pattie (1991), Heath et al. (1991), Cain (1978), Blais and Nadeau (1996), Alvarez and Nagler (2000), Alvarez et al. (2006), Myatt (2007), Kiewiet (2013).

  4. Kawai and Watanabe (2013) study strategic behavior in Japan. Cox and Shugart (1996) study their model’s predictions on the ratio of the vote won by the ‘second loser’ to that of the ‘first losers’ for Colombia and Japan. Moser and Scheiner (2009) apply the latter methodology to another 10 countries. Katz and Levin (2011) study voters’ electoral coordination to behave strategically. Some papers have covered strategic behavior related to coalition governments (Hobolt and Karp 2010; Irwin and Van Holsteyn 2012; Meffert and Gschwend 2010; among others). Duch and Palmer (2002) and Tavits and Annus (2006) study former communist countries.

  5. Parties that achieve less than 1.5 % of the total positive votes during the primaries cannot participate in the general election.

  6. It is possible, though, that voters make mistakes when casting their ballots, or that election officials make counting errors.

  7. The ideological position of PRO comes from Calvo and Murillo (2005). The alliance UNEN includes also the core of the UCR, labeled as centre-right in Calvo and Murillo (2005). But, as the leader of UNEN-CS, Pino Solanas, comes from a left-wing background, I assigned UNEN-CS a centre-left position. As the leader of UNEN-SM is a former core member of the UCR, I placed UNEN-Others in a centre-right position. I placed the FPV to the left, based on Saiegh (2015). In addition to the ideological positions, one can classify the main parties in terms of government and opposition. FPV is the incumbent party in the National Government, while PRO leads the City Government. The alliance UNEN is then in double-opposition in the City of Buenos Aires.

  8. All voting age citizens in Argentina are automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 years old. Those between 16 and 17 years old can chose to register.

  9. If the party with the third largest vote share trailed significantly behind the runner-up, it could be optimal for the supporters of the third (and smaller parties) to cast a vote for one of the top two, in order to affect which of them obtains one and two seats. This is why the number of parties who can obtain a seat plus one is an upper bound on the number of vote-getting parties with strategic voters, instead of tighter prediction.

  10. This assumption rules out situations in which voters believe that most of the support for a given party in the primary election was simply the result of strategic primary voters, instead of a reflection of the support for that party. It is indeed possible that some of the votes obtained by UNEN-CS and UNEN-Others were actually cast by voters who preferred FPV or PRO, but tried to influence the only major contested primary. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that a large part of UNEN primary voters are of this type, as that would require a complex coordination between voters and a balancing act to avoid diluting the vote share of their preferred party too much.

  11. See, for example, Weisberg and Miller (1980).

  12. See Benewick et al. (1969), Himmelweit et al. (1978).

  13. Germany’s two tier system has been exploited by Gschwend (2007) by considering that voters not only care who gets elected, but what coalition government results from the election. Meffert and Gschwend (2010) conduct similar analyzes for Austria, and Bowler et al. (2010) for New Zealand.

  14. For example, Andreadis and Chadjipadelis (2009) analyze the French Presidential first- and second-round elections of 2007 using data from 96 departments in metropolitan France, the smallest of them having a population of 77 thousand, and the largest 2.5 million.

  15. Some people do not change their legal addresses, therefore voting in places other than where they live.

  16. The city of Buenos Aires is administratively divided into 15 comunas, each with its respective community center for administrative purposes.

  17. All voting age citizens in Argentina are automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 years old. Those between 16 and 17 years of age need to register to vote, if they choose to do so.

  18. See Online Appendix D.

  19. See Online Appendix E estimates by comuna.

  20. I also considered other variables that might be related to the levels of vote wasting across provinces (unreported). The vote share of the third party and the margin between the second and third parties show no clear relation with vote wasting, although it is reasonable to expect that the better the performance of the third party and the smaller the margin, the less vote wasting should be observed. The actual (as opposed to effective) number of lists shows a very weak positive correlation with vote wasting, but was excluded as the effective number of lists is a better representation of competition and the complexity of the election.

  21. That is, the effective number of lists excluding the winning party is calculated by completely ignoring the party that obtained more votes in the primary election and obtaining the effective number of parties from among the remaining ones.

  22. The parties that increased their vote shares between primary and general elections are loosely aligned with the PJ.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank R. Michael Alvarez for invaluable advise, Roderick Kiewiet, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, Welmar Rosado, and Marcelo Fernández, and participants at the MPSA Annual Meeting in Chicago April 2015 and the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Political Methodology in Rochester July 2015. Replication code and data is available at the Political Behavior Dataverse at ”Replication Data for: ’Expressive and Strategic Behavior in Legislative Elections in Argentina”’, http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PEXMHA

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  1. Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, 1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA

    Lucas Núñez

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Correspondence to Lucas Núñez.

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Núñez, L. Expressive and Strategic Behavior in Legislative Elections in Argentina. Polit Behav 38, 899–920 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-016-9340-1

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