Looking more closely at the way people form expectations about the possible outcome of the election in their electoral district I will provide evidence for the first time that strategic voting can be observed and predicted even in PR systems with large districts magnitudes, such as in Portugal....

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...

What is the impact of electoral rules on the way people make decisions in the voting booth? Traditionally the literature about electoral systems argues that the size of the district magnitude determines the amount of strategic voting. I argue, however, that different electoral systems provide...

Expectations about the outcome of elections play an important role in both rational choice and social psychological theories of voting. So far, however, there is not much research on the formation of expectations and their influence on voting behavior. In this paper, we use election studies from...

The paper addresses two points: First, what is the effect of changes to the electoral system in Belgium and second, how do voters respond to the new electoral rules? If seat-maximization is the key link then this would lead to the prediction that parties that supported the change of the...

The paper investigates how poll information and coalition signals affect strategic voting, defined as casting a vote for a party other than the most preferred party to better influence the election outcome. In particular if the outcome of an election is perceived to be close, voters in...

Our basic argument is that in multi-party systems we should not only analyze party preferences but also coalition preferences in order to explain voting behavior. We distinguish between coalition leaning and coalition preference and are interested in explaining under what conditions an explicit...

In this paper we are interested in explaining strategic ticket-splitting in the German mixed-electoral system across time. We propose that mainly two factors determine the level of strategic ticket-splitting across electoral districts and across time. The closer the district race is expected or...

This paper investigates order effects in one-sided and two-sided communications. While most theorizing attributes both primacy and recency effects to cognitive processes (e.g., attention decrement), we propose that, in addition, communicative aspects play a central role in the emergence of order...

The theory of strategic voting has been tested in experiments for elections in single member districts with three candidates or parties. It is unclear whether it can explain strategic voting behavior in a fairly common type of political system, multi-party systems with proportional...