Orit Kedar

When Moderate Voters Prefer Extreme Parties: Policy Balancing in Parliamentary Elections

This work develops and tests a theory of voter choice in parliamentary elections. I demonstrate that voters are concerned with policy outcomes and hence incorporate the way institutions convert votes to policy into their choices. Since policy is often the result of institutionalized multiparty bargaining and thus votes are watered down by power-sharing, voters often compensate for this watering-down by supporting parties whose positions differ from (and are often more extreme than) their own. I use this insight to reinterpret an ongoing debate between proximity and directional theories of voting, showing that voters prefer parties whose positions differ from their own views insofar as these parties pull policy in a desired direction. Utilizing data from four parliamentary democracies that vary in their institutional design, I test my theory and show how institutional context affects voter behavior.

Voter Choice and Parliamentary Politics: An Emerging Research Agenda

This article offers organizing principles to an emerging research agenda that analyses how parliamentary politics affects voter considerations. It uses the process by which votes are turned into policy as a unifying framework: every step in the process poses incentives for voters and encourages different types of strategic behaviour by voters. The standard version of strategic voting commonly found in analyses of voter choice is about the step familiar from the Anglo-American model – the allocation of seats based on votes – yet insights about voter behaviour originated from that model have been inadvertently reified and assumed to apply universally. The article identifies a set of empirical implications about the likelihood of voters employing policy-oriented strategies under different circumstances.