Spoiler effect

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As a spoiler effect or spoiler effect (engl. Spoiler , spoiler ') is in the political science denotes the effect that a minority candidate deprives him the (policy) closer standing candidate voices and thereby helps further comprising at his candidate to win.

The effect occurs above all in a majority vote , since a candidate can win even if he receives less than 50 percent of the vote. Let A and A 'be two candidates with a similar program favored by the majority of voters and B a candidate who advocates opposite goals. Because of the votes that are shared between A and A ', B can win even though the majority of voters vote against him if, for example, A receives 30%, A' 30% and B 40% of the vote.

For example, the US presidential elections in 1912, 1992 and 2000 were influenced by third-party candidates. 1912 was Theodore Roosevelt at the nomination of the Republican not against the incumbent President William Howard Taft prevail. He then stood as a candidate for the newly founded Progressive Party . In the election, Roosevelt received more votes than Taft, but Woodrow Wilson won from the Democrats .

In the 1992 election , Ross Perot was an independent candidate who took away enough votes from incumbent President George Bush to enable the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton to win an overwhelming election with just 43% of the vote.

In the 2000 election , Democratic candidate Al Gore received about half a million more votes than Republican George W. Bush ; However, due to Ralph Nader's candidacy for the Greens , he lacked a majority in the electoral committee .

A similar effect enabled Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to prevail over three rival candidates, each of whom could have potentially won against him individually.

In Germany , the SPD held a primary election for party leadership in 1993 for the first time. Rudolf Scharping , Gerhard Schröder and Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul were candidates . Scharping, who was assigned to the right wing of the party, was able to prevail against Schröder with a relative majority, since Wieczorek-Zeul Schröder, who was also assigned to the left wing of the party, cost the majority.

A similar effect can also occur with proportional representation if a small party cannot get into parliament due to a threshold clause , but a larger party with a similar program loses enough votes that it does not receive a majority that it would probably have received without the small party standing.

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