Learning to make votes count: The role of democratic experience

This paper argues that strategic voting in young democracies increases as voters become more experienced with the functioning of democracy. This proposition is tested with election results from the democracies of Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union. The amount of wasted votes decreases with time, controlling for the number of lists running, the electoral system, the legal threshold, and the amount of votes for the leading list. The study contributes to the literature on strategic voting and democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe.