The Effects of District Magnitude on Voting Behavior

Is there more sincere voting in multi-member districts than in single-member districts? Existing research on this question is inconclusive, at least in part because it is difficult with observational data to isolate the effect of district magnitude on voting behavior independently from voters’ prefe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 79; no. 1; pp. 356 - 361
Main Authors Hix, Simon, Hortala-Vallve, Rafael, Riambau-Armet, Guillem
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Chicago on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association 01.01.2017
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Districts
Preferences
SHORT ARTICLE
Voter behavior
Voters
Voting behavior
sincere
strategic
experiment
district magnitude
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Summary:Is there more sincere voting in multi-member districts than in single-member districts? Existing research on this question is inconclusive, at least in part because it is difficult with observational data to isolate the effect of district magnitude on voting behavior independently from voters’ preferences or the number of parties. Hence, we investigate this issue in a laboratory experiment, where we vary district magnitude while keeping the distribution of voters’ preferences and the number of parties constant. We find that voting for the preferred party (sincere voting) increases with district magnitude. This is consistent with existing findings from observational data. We also discover a surprising result: a high incidence of “frontrunner” voting, which cannot be easily explained by existing research.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/688889