Abstract.  There is more to strategic voting than simply avoiding wasting one's vote if one is liberated from the corset of studying voting behavior in plurality systems. Mixed electoral systems provide different voters with diverse incentives to cast a strategic vote. They not only determine the degree of strategic voting, but also the kind of strategies voters employ. Strategic voters employ either a wasted‐vote or a coalition insurance strategy, but do not automatically cast their vote for large parties as the current literature suggest. This has important implications for the consolidation of party systems. Moreover, even when facing the same institutional incentives, voters vary in their proclivity to vote strategically.

Constituency campaigns are im portant phenomena fo r students o f political parties, voting behaviour as well as p o litica l communication. These research communities perceive constituency campaigns as p a rts o f centralised high-tech campaigns aiming in strategic ways a t the efficient m obilisation o f voters. We propose in this paper an alternative understanding o f constituency campaigns using the case o f the German parliam entary elections in 2005 to em pirically test this understanding. We perceive constituency campaigns as phenom ena signalling a relative independence o f individual candidates fro m the national p a r ty cam paign. We label this phenomenon individualised campaigning. We argue th at individualised campaigning is driven among others by electoral incentives. W e test this hypothesis with regard to the German mixed-member electoral system and on the basis o f a survey o f all candidates standing fo r election in 2005. Two Different Perspectives on Constituency Campaigns Election campaigns are traditionally multilevel. One level is national and it is populated by political celebrities standing as front runners for their parties. Their primary means of communication are the mass media, political advertisements and large-scale political rallies. A second campaign level is local. It is mostly populated by quite average citizens running on a party list or for a direct mandate in a local constituency. They meet their potential voters face-to-face on m arket squares, through visits to companies, at social events, or simply through knocking on their front doors. This paper is about the relationship between these two levels in the German parliamentary election o f 2005 and on the way the country's mixed-member voting system patterns this relationship.

Nutzungsbedingungen: Dieser Text wird unter einer Deposit-Lizenz (Keine Weiterverbreitung -keine Bearbeitung) zur Verfügung gestellt. Gewährt wird ein nicht exklusives, nicht übertragbares, persönliches und beschränktes Recht auf Nutzung dieses Dokuments. Dieses Dokument ist ausschließlich für den persönlichen, nicht-kommerziellen Gebrauch bestimmt. Auf sämtlichen Kopien dieses Dokuments müssen alle Urheberrechtshinweise und sonstigen Hinweise auf gesetzlichen Schutz beibehalten werden. Sie dürfen dieses Dokument nicht in irgendeiner Weise abändern, noch dürfen Sie dieses Dokument für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, aufführen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Mit der Verwendung dieses Dokuments erkennen Sie die Nutzungsbedingungen an. Terms of use:This document is made available under Deposit Licence (No Redistribution -no modifications). We grant a non-exclusive, nontransferable, individual and limited right to using this document. This document is solely intended for your personal, noncommercial use. All of the copies of this documents must retain all copyright information and other information regarding legal protection. You are not allowed to alter this document in any way, to copy it for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the document in public, to perform, distribute or otherwise use the document in public. By using this particular document, you accept the above-stated conditions of use.

Polls and coalition signals can help strategic voters in multiparty systems with proportional representation and coalition governments to optimise their vote decision. Using a laboratory experiment embedded in two real election campaigns, this study focuses on voters' attention to and perception of polls and coalition signals. The manipulation of polls and coalition signals allows a causal test of their influence on strategic voting in a realistic environment. The findings suggest that active information acquisition to form fairly accurate perceptions of election outcomes can compensate for the advantage of high political sophistication. The theory of strategic voting is supported by the evidence, but only for a small number of voters. Most insincere vote decisions are explained by other factors. Thus, the common practice to consider all insincere voters as strategic is misleading.

What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns that focuses on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrospective voting.