Strategic Voting for the Israeli Knesset, 2003

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Israel will hold elections on January 28, 2003 for the Knesset, their national legislature. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research is to assist the Principal Investigator and an advanced graduate student in including a battery of questions in the Israel National Election survey to study whether there is strategic voting in that election. This study is particularly timely and important and builds empirically on work begun on strategic voting in the 1999 Israeli election by a team that includes the Principal Investigator and a collaborator. The research is significant because: 1) prior work offers the suspicion that there is a considerable degree of strategic voting (voting not in accord with the voter's true preference order but meant to bring about an outcome more desired by the voter than the social choice that would result from voting in accord with the voter's true preference order) in this, the most nearly perfect proportional representation electoral system in the world. Theory, such as that from Maurice Duverger and Gary Cox implies at least that such voting should be extremely rare, if not none existent entirely. And yet, earlier work suggests that it is as common as in simply plurality voting, where theory says that it should be extensive. It appears that no one, including the Principal Investigator has been able to employ the full set of measures needed to test for this possibility, let alone even begin to investigate the reasoning for its occurrence, should the suggestive evidence be confirmed; 2) this is the first Israeli Knesset election since the change in electoral law and such change provides a unique opportunity to test for the effect of changing institutional rules on voting behavior; 3) one reason for the lack of theoretical development of the study of PR systems, relative to plurality systems, is the difficulty in determining the electoral goals of parties in a multi-party PR system, and thus the impact of these goals on voter behavior. Measure of each of the three most prominent goals are being investigated, two of which are novel measures used in surveys of the mass public. The Principal Investigator is in a position to be able to measure how, if at all, voters react to the strategic circumstances facing political parties in multi-party, Proportional Representation systems. This investigation will yield a data set that will be of enormous value to other scholars interested in the topic. The study has the potential to enhance our understanding of the topic and to have a broader social value of helping us to understand the effects of voting systems on electoral outcomes.