RAPID: Assessing Voting Behavior in Elections

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This project examines voting in multi-candidate elections. The principal investigators seek to understand the conditions under which voters are willing to not vote for their most preferred alternative, and to instead consider casting a "strategic" ballot in order to help a second-choice alternative defeat a third-choice alternative. In democracies using single-member-district plurality electoral laws, voters only rarely choose among three candidates in the general election. The PIs propose to conduct multi-wave telephone surveys both before and after elections in six states where public opinion polling has indicated that three candidates are viable. The PIs are thus equipped to probe the conditions under which voters might opt to abandon their most-preferred candidate, and to vote instead for a second-best candidate in hopes of defeating their least preferred alternative. This survey thus permits an unmatched opportunity to examine strategic voting in different races and contexts within the same electoral cycle. This project makes several contributions. The project will enhance understanding of voter decision-making not only in multi-way races but more broadly as well. Comprehending the behavior of voters in turn stands as a central concern of political science and contributes to a deeper knowledge of the workings of democratic processes and institutions. The PIs aim to maximize leverage from the grant through their use of interactive voice response (IVR) surveys, where respondents note their answers to questions by pressing buttons on their keypad. IVR telephone surveys deliver high-quality data, are extremely cost-effective, and yet are not widely used in political science research. The data generated by the project will be made available to scholars and policymakers. Findings from the project will be of interest to policymakers and to political scientists specializing in public opinion and in electoral and party politics.