Going It Alone? Strategic Entry under Mixed Electoral Rules

Recent studies on strategic voting and entry in elections that combine plurality or majority and proportional representation (PR) have found candidate placement in single‐member district (SMD) races to improve a party's PR performance. The primary implication of the existence of “contamination effects” is that parties have an incentive to nominate candidates in as many single‐member districts as possible. Pre‐electoral coordination in the majoritarian component of mixed electoral systems, however, is far from uncommon. In this article, we identify a number of institutional incentives that induce political parties to form pre‐electoral alliances in spite of contamination effects. By identifying institutions that favor and hamper coordination, we seek to advance the understanding of PR‐SMD interactions and to assess their implications for the design, classification, and empirical analysis of mixed electoral rules. Our statistical tests evaluate strategic entry in a diverse sample of countries.