Picking the winners: Perceptions of party viability and their impact on voting behavior

Objective. In this paper, we attempt to answer three crucial questions regarding the impact of perceptions of party viability (i.e., a party's chances of winning an election) on vote choice: first, do assessments of national-or district-level viability have the greatest impact on vote choice?; second, what factors influence voters' perceptions of party viability!; and third, to what extent are voters' choices strategic and to what extent are they symptomatic of the so-called bandwagon effect? Methods. We analyze data from the 1988 Canadian National Election Study. We conduct analyses using OLS regression, crosstabulations, and probit methodology. Results. We find that 1) assessments of district-level viability have the greatest impact on voting behavior, 2) voters' opinions about party viability are based both on projection effects and on an accurate reading of relative party strength, and 3) the Canadian case provides evidence of both strategic and bandwagon voting. Conclusions. Our findings reveal that voters are able to make fairly sophisticated choices about the options available to them based on generally accurate assessments of the parties' chances of winning. But we also uncover some evidence of apparently nonrational voting based on a desire to back a likely winner (even if that likely winner represents the voter's least-preferred party).