Strategic Ticket Splitting and the Personal Vote in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems

Abstract

This article examines ticket splitting in five different mixed-member electoral systems—Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Lithuania, and Russia—and indicates the shortcomings inherent in any analysis of such ticket splitting that does not take into account the presence of the personal vote. We find that the personal vote plays a central part in shaping ticket splitting in all of our cases except for Germany, a heavily party-oriented system in which we find evidence of only a weak personal vote but evidence of substantial strategic voting. Mixed-member electoral systems have gained substantial attention as growing numbers of states have adopted systems that provide voters with two ballots in elections for legislative office—one for a party list in a proportional representation (PR) tier and one for a candidate in a single-member district (SMD) tier (see, for example, Massicotte and Blais 1999; Moser 2001; and Shugart and Wattenberg 2001). Analysis of strategic voting in such systems is particularly well established in the literature. Scholars cite ticket splitting, in which voters cast a greater number of votes for large parties in the SMD tier than in the PR tier and, conversely, a smaller number of votes for minor parties in the SMD tier, as evidence that voters react strategically to electoral rules that tend to deny representation to minor parties. 1 Yet such analyses often do not account sufficiently for another factor that can drive ticket splitting: the personal vote, defined here as additional SMD votes cast for a candidate due to the candidate’s personal appeal to voters rather than his or her strategic behavior. In this article, we examine ticket splitting in five different mixedmember electoral systems—Germany, New Zealand, Japan, Lithuania,