Tatiana Kostadinova, "Party Strategies and Voter Behavior in the East European Mixed Election System," Party Politics, 12 (January, 2006), 121-143.

First Paragraph:
The final decade of the twentieth century saw a wide range of electoral systems that combined majoritarian and proportional representation (PR) rules in the election of members of parliament. In several developed democracies, high expectations for bringing together the best of the two older systems encouraged the adoption of mixed election rules. Complicated by design, these institutional innovations confront all participants in the electoral competition with serious challenges. Both political parties and voters in countries with mixed electoral systems have to adapt to two electoral principles, PR and plurality, which generate contradictory incentives and presuppose coordinated responses. Decisions over participation and choice are even tougher at the beginning, because knowledge of how the new system works and how the other participants are responding is insufficient. This problem is especially serious in the East European transitional environment. While in developed democracies party leaders and voters possess certain skills relating to that part of the election to which they were previously exposed, similar experience is absent in the post-Communist states.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1. Hypothetical constituency distributions for four parties
Table 1. Parties and candidates entering mixed-system elections
Table 2. Constituency proportion distributions and coalition strategy choices of parties in East European mixed-system election
Table 3. Wasted vote in the PR part of mixed-system elections in Croatia, Lithuania and Ukraine
Figure 2. Single-member district vote distribution in mixed-system parliamentary elections in Croatia, Lithuania and Ukraine
Table 4. Regression analysis of split-ticket voting: Croatia 1995, Lithuania 2000 and Ukraine 2002
Appendix. Mixed election systems in Croatia, Lithuania and Ukraine

First Paragraph of Conclusion:
I began the investigation of party and voter behavior in mixed-system elections with a recognition that the combination of two methods with contradictory incentives makes coordination of choices very difficult. Previous research on the emergence of hybrid rules has indicated that this problem is serious, and that building a better understanding of how participants in those elections act is important given the recent proliferation of combined systems around the globe. Consequently, I: (1) develop a spatial explanation of party decisions to enter coalitions in the two tiers of competition, (2) identify factors that lead to instances of strategic ballot-splitting by voters, and (3) analyze the proposed effects using data from three East European transitional democracies.