Thomas Gschwend
Ticket-Splitting and Strategic Voting under Mixed Electoral Rules: Evidence from Germany

SFB 504 discussion paper
05-06 p.
,
Mannheim
,
2005

There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding to waste someone’s vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with various incentives to cast a strategic vote. They do 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 cast their vote not automatically for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implication for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically.