Abstract
The strategic voting across families of various electoral systems is often depicted as “settling for lesser evil” (e.g. Cox in Making votes count. Strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1997; Gschwend 2004) in order to prevent the worst outcome of elections. In this paper we experimentally (13 sessions with 18–30 participants, 546 voting situations) explore the degree of strategic voting (as compared to non-voting) framed in situations with (non-compulsory) costly voting where voters face outcomes with positive and negative payoffs (“stopping the evil” framing) and/or with solely negative payoffs (“settling for lesser evil” framing). We explore voters’ decisions in rather complex environment of the two-round electoral system, with symmetric amount of private information about the preferences of electorate available to them and show that voters’ behavior does differ markedly in both the situations. The results have implications for the representation and democracy.
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We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Czech Science foundation (Project GA13-20548S) and Masaryk University Grant (Project MUNI/M/0045/2013).
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Chytilek, R., Tóth, M. (2017). Stopping the Evil or Settling for the Lesser Evil: An Experimental Study of Costly Voting with Negative Payoffs in a TRS Electoral System. In: Maturo, A., Hošková-Mayerová, Š., Soitu, DT., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Recent Trends in Social Systems: Quantitative Theories and Quantitative Models. Studies in Systems, Decision and Control, vol 66. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40585-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40585-8_9
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