Voting When You Already Know the Results: Electoral Information and Strategic Coordination in Peru’s 2026 Presidential Election

Alejandro Plaza
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Alejandro Plaza: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

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Abstract: When voters receive real-time information about an ongoing election, do they coordinate strategically — and does that coordination respect ideological boundaries? I argue that viability signals produce ideologically bounded coordination: voters shift toward the most viable candidate within their political neighborhood rather than gravitating toward any national leader. To test this, I exploit a natural experiment in Peru's 2026 presidential election, where a logistical failure caused some polling stations to vote one day late, after partial results were already public, generating exogenous variation in information access across otherwise comparable voters. Informed voters concentrated their votes roughly 57 percent more than uninformed voters. A further test reveals that concentration rose sharply within the centrist bloc but not the right bloc, consistent with within-bloc rather than cross-ideological coordination. These findings illuminate how strategic voting operates under extreme party fragmentation and suggest that information revelation may strengthen rather than distort electoral representation.

Date: 2026-07-06
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:dzntx_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/dzntx_v1

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