國立臺灣大學政治科學論叢

Abstract / Chinese PDF Download

In the 2018 Taipei City Mayoral Election, voters were highly motivated to consider voting strategically, given that there was a very close race between the two frontrunners. Surprisingly, the third-place candidate still received a considerably large proportion of the votes in this election, which caused the effective number of viable candidates to reach a twenty-four-year high in Taipei City. In this article, we utilize Taiwan’s Election and Democratization Study 2018A (n=1130) to investigate why voters chose to, and chose not to, vote strategically. The results show that: (1) about 9.9% of respondents voted for the second-preferred candidate; (2) the decision to vote strategically was mainly driven by the respondents’ approval of the most-preferred candidate and the difference of approval between the most- and second-preferred candidates. Voters are much more likely to choose the second-preferred candidate if the most-preferred candidate is not perceived to be good enough, while the difference between the most- and second-preferred candidates is close. (3) The candidates’ perceived chance of winning has no impact on the voters’ decision to vote strategically; (4) owing to the two former factors, the tendency of strategic voting is similar across the supporters of the three major candidates. Hence, voters may perceive that their preferred candidate will not win, but also think that their preferred candidate is far better than the other two frontrunners, so they ignore the chances of winning and still vote sincerely. Such a strong preference gap may have contributed to the unique ballot distribution in the 2018 Taipei City Mayoral Election.