Ticket-splitting and strategic voting under mixed electoral rules: evidence from Germany

Abstract

"There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one’s vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote.They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a wasted-vote or a coalition insurance strategy, but do not automatically cast their vote for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implications for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically." (author's abstract)