Opening the Ballot Box: Strategic Voting in Turkey's June 2018 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections

Abstract

How do voters react to electoral incentives for strategic voting when presidential and parliamentary elections are held concurrently and under different systems? Previous research has concluded that different systems can shape the preferences of voters and create different incentives to vote strategically, yet the effect of the concurrent presidential and parliamentary elections is still unclear. This study analyzes the incentives in such a setting in a case study of Turkey. By employing King’s ecological inference solution and using ballot-box level data, this article shows that 9 percent of total voters cast a strategic vote in the 2018 elections. Moreover, if supporters of the two main parties are excluded from the analysis, as they had no reason to vote strategically because their most preferred candidate was perceived to be one of the top two contenders, the percentage of strategic voters increases to 25 percent.