Strategic, Sincere, and Heuristics Voting under Four Election Rules: An Experimental Study
Résumé
We report on laboratory experiments on voting. In a setting where
subjects have single-peaked preferences we find that the rational choice
theory provides very good predictions of actual individual behavior in
one-round and approval voting elections, but fares poorly in explaining
vote choice under two-round elections. We conclude that voters behave
strategically as far as strategic computations are not too demanding,
in which case they rely on simple heuristics or they just vote sincerely.