Beauty contests and strategic voting

•Individual differences in strategic inference matter for strategic voting.•Those who display strategic inference vote strategically based on probability calculations.•Strategic inference can be recovered with a p-value one-shot beauty contest.•The paper makes use of an experimental election paradigm.

Prevailing models of strategic voting demonstrate that individuals are less likely to vote strategically when their preferences for a third-place party increase or when the chances of their preferred party winning increase. Rather than both of these factors influencing all voters, we demonstrate that these two factors are used by different types of voters. Using a one-shot p-beauty contest, we separate subjects into those who display strategic inference and those who do not. We then show, using data from two different experiments, that those subjects who exhibit strategic inference rely on probabilistic information about their preferred party when deciding to cast a strategic vote, while those who do not display strategic inference rely on the strength of their preferences.