Josh asks in comments below whether there is any way to test the strategic voting argument. The only work I know of on this in the UK context is “Betsy Sinclair’s very interesting working paper”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/05/the_uk_election_again.html#comments (but then I am neither a UK politics specialist nor an electoral studies person). It is interesting though to see strategic voting becoming a topic of “political debate”:http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/election/?p=1967 in Britain.
bq. Conservatives like @iaindale are rightly anxious that the tactical voting surge could help rob the Tories of a majority. He fears that reporting the possibility of tactical voting is akin to advocating it: … It’s a tricky one, especially in the Internet age when it is relatively easy to give a guide to how to vote tactically online. There are plenty of websites devoted to campaigning for tactical voting. But you can use constituency information from the BBC Election Guide to do it yourself. …The whole Lib Dem surge has brought some seats into play that looked safe Labour or Tory bets a month ago. So there is actually a legitimate demand from the voters for some guidance on this. Surely the BBC, as well as the partisan newspapers, should provide that? The paradox is that the broadcasters are generally seen as impartial conveyors of political information so if they start to give guidance to the tactical voting choices at constituency level then people may start believing them. At that point, it could be argued, they are getting too close to advocating a particular voting choice. It is perfectly legitimate for the BBC to cover the general story that politicians are advocating tactical voting. With the polls suggesting a hung parliament it is the hot issue over the next few days. But I agree with Iain that the BBC in particular needs to leave the finer detail to the campaigning websites and the newspapers and get back to the policy issues.
What seems a bit odd to me is the implicit claim that strategic (or ‘tactical’) voting is somehow dubious or politicized. There are a number of heroic assumptions underlying democratic assumptions about voting – that voters are well informed about issues, that they want someone who is the best match to their pre-defined policy preferences, that individual voting decisions count in some significant way and so on. But putting these aside – more information is better than less information, no? The case for the BBC declining to tell its viewers about tactical voting choices seems to me to be no better than the case for the BBC declining to tell its viewers that the Tories support this policy, and Labour that one. Both provide voters with information which should (in an ideal world) make their voting decisions better informed. A refusal to provide information (because it might disadvantage one political party, which hopes that strategic voting is minimal) seems much more problematic and biased to me.