Distinguishing between strategic and stochastic voters: An empirical study of misaligned voting in the 2010 Swedish parliamentary election

Sammanfattning: This paper examines the proportion of the Swedish electorate that did not vote for their most preferred party in the parliamentary election of 2010. We propose a way in which we can divide these misaligning voters into subgroups in order to further increase the understanding of what drives this behaviour. A binary probit model is designed to better determine the share of these voters that should be considered truly strategic and those that should not. The data in use is a National Election Study conducted by the SOM-institute at the University of Gothenburg. By distinguishing between the misaligning voters through our dependent variable of political sophistication, we find that political interest increases the probability of a misaligner being truly strategic. The other independent variables tested, level of news consumption and whether a respondent has a second-best party alternative, both point in the same direction, but are statistically insignificant.