Electoral coordination and the strategic desertion of strong parties in compensatory mixed systems with negative vote transfers

Through the analysis of the 1994 and 1996 elections of Italy's Chamber of Deputies, this article examines the incentives that partially compensatory mixed-member majoritarian systems with negative vote transfers provide to voters and parties. I find that the plurality tier of such systems is not affected by contamination from the PR tier. In the PR tier, however, negative vote transfers are found to affect election results, beyond the mechanical correction of disproportionality, by providing voters with the incentive to defect from strong lists when district magnitude is small. I show that the PR tier is characterized by a negative relationship between district magnitude and the number of parties. These results are consistent with recent findings indicating that mixed systems are empirically distinct from pure PR and plurality systems. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.