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Do some types of voters vote more strategically than others? We examine this question using a large survey in Canada that asked respondents to rate not just parties and party leaders but also local candidates. Using a new technique for combining multiple preference measures into a single utility estimate, we find that better educated voters and richer voters vote more strategically, as do women and older voters (although the latter two differences are smaller). Together with recent evidence from the United Kingdom, these results suggest that (at least in multicandidate first-past-the-post elections) the same types of voters who are more likely to turn out are also more likely to make their votes count. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread misperceptions about COVID-19 and the novel coronavirus threaten to exacerbate the severity of the pandemic. We conducted preregistered survey experiments in the United States, Great Britain and Canada examining the effectiveness of fact-checks that seek to correct these false or unsupported beliefs. Across three countries with differing levels of political conflict over the pandemic response, we demonstrate that fact-checks reduce targeted misperceptions, especially among the groups who are most vulnerable to these claims, and have minimal spillover effects on the accuracy of related beliefs. However, these reductions in COVID-19 misperception beliefs do not persist over time in panel data even after repeated exposure. These results suggest that fact-checks can successfully change the COVID-19 beliefs of the people who would benefit from them most but that their effects are ephemeral., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)