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Strategic voting revisited: the case of the 2018 Taipei City mayoral election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2021

Chung-li Wu Open the ORCID record for Chung-li Wu [Opens in a new window] ,
Alex Min-Wei Lin  and
Chingching Chang
Chung-li Wu*
Affiliation:
Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, 128 Academia Road, Section 2, Taipei11529, Taiwan
Alex Min-Wei Lin
Affiliation:
Department of Public Administration, National Chengchi University, 64 ZhiNan Road, Section 2, Taipei11605, Taiwan
Chingching Chang
Affiliation:
The Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei11529, Taiwan Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research, National Chengchi University, Taipei11605, Taiwan
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this study, we examine whether strategic voting – in which a voter seeks to maximize the expected payoff from casting a ballot – occurred among late voters in the 2018 Taipei City mayoral election. This multi-candidate mayoral contest was noteworthy because ballot-counting started before all the votes had been cast, with preliminary results being leaked to the media. Theoretically, having access to real-time updates of voting figures could have influenced the decision of voters who were still in line waiting to cast their ballots. Analysis and reconstruction of aggregate polling data, however, demonstrate that there was very little (if any) strategic voting among these late voters on election day, even if they had information that might have induced them to vote strategically.

Keywords

Rational choicesincere votingstrategic votingutility maximizer
Type
Research Article
Information
Japanese Journal of Political Science , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 2021 , pp. 175 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Supplementary material: Link

Wu et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JYKQLH
Link