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

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. Broadening the scope: Strategic voting in mixed electoral systems What is the influence of electoral rules on the way people make decisions in the voting booth? This work attempts to refocus the discussion of the impact of electoral institutions on voting behavior from its narrow focus on singlemember plurality systems. The literature on strategic voting agrees that institutional incentives are the driving force that spurs strategic voting. That being said, it is somewhat surprising that this literature has not looked more closely at variations in the main independent variable and studied the effect of a variety of institutional settings on the extent and nature of the strategic voting phenomenon. Similar to a natural experiment, the focus on two-ballot mixed electoral systems offers the opportunity to study influences of electoral rules by holding individual factors constant: The same voter, after all, cast two separate votes – a candidate vote and a list vote – under different rules. We know that naively applying behavioral theories without reference to the institutional embeddedness of the act of voting is misconceived. Some voters systematically deviate from their most preferred candidate or party in the voting booth, contrary to what traditional vote choice theories would predict, and cast their vote for a less preferred one.Theories of strategic voting offer an opportunity to extend traditional vote choice predictions in order European Journal of Political Research 46: 1–23, 2007 1 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2006.00641.x © 2006 The Author(s) Journal compilation © 2006 (European Consortium for Political Research) Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,