......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... doi:10.1017/S104909651400208X © American Political Science Association, 2015 PS • April 2015 301 Timothy S. Rich is assistant professor of political science at Western Kentucky University. His research focuses on electoral politics with a regional focus on East Asia. He can be reached at timothy.rich@wku.edu. FEATURES Strategic Voting and the Role of Polls: Evidence from an Embedded Web Survey Timothy S. Rich, Western Kentucky University ABSTRACT What motivates people to vote strategically? Although a broad literature addresses this question, few studies capture the point at which individuals shift from sin- cere to strategic voters. Furthermore, the influence of polling information remains debated. The analysis in this article tackles strategic voting with an original embedded experiment in a web survey. Empirical analysis finds that respondents who were told of the margin of error in preelection polls were more likely to vote strategically. This analysis also suggests the limits to strategic voting even in ideal settings. W hat motivates people to vote strategically? As one of the most consistent findings in electoral politics, Duverger’s law (Duverger 1954) remains the basis for much of the litera- ture on party systems. Simply stated, Duver- ger’s law is that one-round single-member districts (SMDs) will lead to two-party competition, whereas larger district magnitude under proportional representation (PR) will produce a multiparty system. Because there can be only one winner in SMDs, smaller parties tend to drop out or align with larger parties that have a greater chance of victory. Similarly, voters are unlikely to support candidates who have little chance in winning. Thus, rational vot- ers who are partial to smaller parties are expected to vote strategi- cally, defecting from their first choice and voting for their second choice as a means to maximize their influence on the election and to avoid their least-desired outcome (Cox 1997). Duverger’s law appears to hold in a vast array of countries using SMDs (Amorim-Neto and Cox 1997; Taagepera and Shugart 1993), whereas the empirical record in mixed legisla- tive systems—which allocate seats to both SMDs and by PR to the same chamber—is less straightforward (Ferrara, Herron, and Nishikawa 2005; Shugart and Wattenberg 2001). Devia- tions often are explained as parties and voters responding to a larger competitive environment—for example, the influence of a directly elected president (Shugart and Carey 1992) or federal systems (Lago and Montero 2009). Despite caveats and coun- terevidence (Grofman, Blais, and Bowler 2009), Duverger’s law appears well supported in stable democracies and when ana- lyzed at the district level. A sizable literature identifies institutional settings for strate- gic voting in SMDs and beyond, as well as conditions for stra- tegic voting. Five conditions must be met for strategic voting: voters must (1) have preferences among candidates, (2) see an acceptable alternative to their first choice, (3) have information about candidate viability, (4) expect the outcome to be close, and (5) believe that their actions can be decisive (Acevedo and Krueger 2004; Cox 1997; Darmofal 2010). If, for example, voters realize that their preferred candidate cannot win and shifting support will not likely change the result of the election, a sin- cere vote is still expected. Polls in particular play a vital role in strategic voting. For example, nonscientific polling in young democracies and the gen- eral lack of candidate information may lead to false expectations regarding viability. Forsythe et al.’s (1993) experimental voting analysis found that in the absence of polling information, election results did not correspond to Duverger’s law, whereas Endersby and Shaw (2009) found that the inclusion of preelection polls led to largely consistent results. Similarly, Meffert and Gschwend (2011) found that participants could translate poll information into reasonable election forecasts. Polls have the potential to cre- ate both bandwagon and underdog effects; however, at the very least, they provide additional information about the likelihood of an individual’s preferred candidate winning. However, expec- tations also are heavily shaped by political preferences (Blais and Turgeon 2004; Gimpel and Harvey 1997), and conflicting information may encourage wishful thinking (Babad 1995). Fur- thermore, it remains unclear about the level of polling literacy that is necessary to influence strategic voting and whether, for example, individuals need to comprehend margins of error to vote strategically. A major limitation in analyzing strategic voting is that in most elections using SMDs, even if other nominal candidates run, the