A fővárosi taktikai szavazók nyomában: egy kvalitatív kutatás bemutatása és értékelése

In Hungary, tactical voting has been mainly examined based on the differences between the votes cast on the individual candidate in a specific constituency and on the party list. So far, though, not much effort has been made on investigating the motivations behind the concrete act of tactical balloting. This paper tries to present a qualitative research – a focus group research with a vignette method implemented in it – that attempts to reveal the phenomenon and the possible incentives of tactical voting among the capital citizens to gain a better glimpse into its social embeddedness. In the examination, subjects of four focus groups – two pro-governments and two oppositionists also divided by age (25-44; 45-65) – were asked about their voting behaviour, knowledge, habits and practices of tactical voting and tactical ticket-splitting. As for the answers, the pro-government participants can only imagine the tactical voting in theory, but in practice none of them casts a tactical ballot or splits the votes between different political actors. The oppositionists tend to split the vote and also cast a tactical vote on the oddson candidate to unseat the incumbent, but no other tactical incentives are considered viable in practice by them neither. Of course, the results are not representative and thus no stable conclusions can be drawn from them. Some parts of the methodology of this reserach needs to be re-considered, too.