ASSESSING VARIATION IN MIXED ELECTORAL RULES USING AGENT-BASED MODELS

The proliferation of mixed electoral systems across the globe has spawned a growing literature assessing how these rules affect the behavior of political actors at the micro-level and partisan competition at the macro-level. Scores of single-country studies have analyzed the effects of mixed electoral systems in established democracies1 and transitional states.2 A growing body of literature has investigated the broader implications of mixed systems cross-nationally, benefiting from the accumulated data from a decade and a half of mixed systems' popularity. Despite our increased access to data from the expansion of mixed electoral systems and the conduct of multiple elections using these rules, our ability to draw inferences about their consequences is still constrained. Although Germany has held many elections under its mixed electoral rules, most other countries using mixed systems have conducted four or fewer elections. Moreover, institutional rules vary substantially across mixed systems and many countries have modified their rules over time. Thus, isolating the effects that mixed electoral rules exert, relative to other causal factors, is complicated by their relative newness, profound cross-national variation and longitudinal variability