Alors que la démocratie électorale chilienne commence à se défaire lentement de l’héritage du régime de Portales, la modernisation des techniques et rituels de vote devient une question centrale. La réforme électorale de 1874 est ainsi désignée comme le point de départ de la démocratisation du vote. Cependant, l’ampleur des incertitudes qui s’ouvrent avec les modifications que cette réforme introduit nous obligent à remettre en question les rapports, très souvent présupposés, entre innovations technologiques et démocratisation. Afin d’examiner en détail cette problématique, notre thèse explore les transformations successives du cadre légal, des discours et des représentations iconographiques du vote, à partir de la démarche employée par la sociologie historique. La restitution des controverses, des débats et les différentes représentations de l’acte de vote contribuent à mieux nous faire comprendre les limites que la technologie du vote imposent à l‘expression d’une voix politique, dans une période où le système politique est en train de s’institutionnaliser et les métiers politiques en train de se professionnaliser. / While Chile’s electoral democracy slowly starts to forsake its Portalian stamp, the question about the reforms on vote’s rituals and techniques become crucial. Electoral Reform in 1874 is usually quoted as the first step of democratization rule. Nevertheless, the long list of doubts that opens up alongside with innovation, oblige us to question the relationship, typically presumed, between technological and democratic innovation. In order to examine this problematic issue, our thesis explores the successive transformation of the legal frame, the iconic discourse and the general representation of vote, through a historical-sociological point of view. The study of controversies in this field, the debate and the different representations of the act of vote, help us to deeply understand the limits impose by vote`s technologies to the expression of a political voice, in a time where political system are in process of becoming institutions and to become a politician evolves into a professionalization process.

The objective of this study is to investigate how the phenomenon called the strategic vote is manifested in the legislative elections in France and Sweden. In order to gain knowledge in this domain of study, recent studies and well-established theories within the political science have been observed. The theory of the psychological factor, composed by the French political scientist Maurice Duverger lays the basis of the theory of the strategic vote, which is the central theory for this thesis, mostly defined by Gary W. Cox in Making votes count: strategic coordination in the world’s electoral systems (1997). The main question of research is as follows: “How does the strategic vote manifest itself amongst the voters in the legislative elections of the proportional electoral Swedish system and the majority electoral French system?” The following questions are follow-up questions to complement the main one: “Which are the effects of the strategic vote?” “Which are the differences in the French and Swedish legislative elections that are revealed throughout the interviews?” and “Is the validity of votes under the influence of the phenomenon of the strategic vote questionable?” The method used to obtain answers to the questions above is qualitative interviews with two groups of respondents: one group of respondents of French nationality and another group with respondents of Swedish nationality. The results of the study show that strategic voting in France is mostly due to the two-ballot system that is applied in the French electoral system, where the second ballot is the source to most of the strategic voting in France. The Swedish voters, however, first and foremost vote strategically by reason of the electoral threshold of 4 % that is employed in the Swedish electoral system. The effects of the strategic voting in the concerning states, found in this study are identical: an overrepresentation of the bigger political parties and an underrepresentation of the smaller political parties. Differences in the legislative elections of the countries, France and Sweden, which were revealed during the interviews are differences in electoral participation due to the structure of elections on the various levels, such as municipal, regional and legislative and so forth. The third follow-up question, being of a more philosophical nature, lead to two positions: an idealist and a realist one. Through the results found in this study, the idealist position is the preferred position, in order to respect and achieve the democratic ideals on which the democratic states France and Sweden are based.