| The practice of voting is a fundamental part of every modern democracy. Yet, as a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating citizens' preferences, elections are known to be flawed. At least in theory, voters have a systematic incentive to strategically misrepresent their true preferences in order to "manipulate" the outcome of an election. In practice, however, a single vote is almost never pivotal; which raises the obvious empirical question: Do voters actually behave as predicted by rational choice theory? And if so, by how much does strategic voting affect electoral outcomes?;Exploiting a flaw in the German electoral system by which a party may gain seats by receiving fewer votes, the first chapter of this thesis documents patterns of strategic voting in a large, real world election. During the 2005 elections to the Bundestag, the sudden death of a right-wing candidate necessitated a by-election in one electoral district. Knowing the results in all other districts and aware of the paradoxical incentives in place, a substantial fraction of the electorate reacted tactically and either voted for a party other than their most preferred one, or abstained. As a result, the Christian Democratic Union won an additional mandate, extending its narrow lead over the Social Democrats.;The second chapter takes a more general approach in order to estimate estimate the extent of strategic voting as well as its impact on election results. Evidence from reduced form as well as structural methods indicates that almost one third of voters in Germany abandon their most preferred candidate if she is not in contention for victory. As predicted by theory, tactical behavior has a non-trivial impact on individual races. Yet, as one aggregates across districts, these distortions partially offset each other, resulting in considerably more modest effects on the overall distribution of seats. |
