Political Efficacy, Political Knowledge, Party Identification and Split-Ticket Voting in Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Case of Lithuania

Mixed-member electoral systems are seen by some researchers as “the best of the two worlds”, as they combine best features of proportional and majoritarian representation. Thus, this type of electoral system is becoming popular among architects of the new democracies (Massicotte, Blais 1999; Shugart, Wattenberg 2001; Bormann, Golder 2013). Interestingly, this set of electoral rules produces a phenomenon called split-ticket voting when voters support different parties (and their candidates) in different tiers of elections. This phenomenon has been quite extensively studied not only in mixed electoral systems but also in countries that have multiple direct electoral institutions (as the Congress and the President in the US). However, it has been less extensively studied in newly democratic countries (however, for examples of this type of studies see Duch, Palmer 2002; Kostadinova 2002, 2006; Chandra 2009; Moser, Scheiner 2009). In this paper we analyze split-ticket voting in Lithuania which has a parallel mixed-member electoral system (Ferrara, Herron, Nishikawa, 2005). Our main interest lays in explaining electoral behavior involving split-ticket voting at the individual level. In order to achieve this task we employ data from multiple sources that contain information on voting in different tiers in Lithuanian parliamentary (the Seimas) elections: the European Social Survey and the Lithuanian National Election Study. We try to explain split-ticket voting by three major factors: internal political efficacy (extent to which voters regard themselves as competent political actors), political knowledge (extent to which voters posses adequate understanding of the political world) and party identity (identification with different parties). We hypothesize that internal political efficacy (competence) and political knowledge are conducive to selecting different representatives in different tiers when voters are discontent with the outcomes of the governance (are dissatisfied with democracy in country, distrust political institutions and negatively evaluate the incumbent government). Here local politics (in single-member districts) and overall performance of the governing party might influence electoral decisions of the voters. On the other hand, we regard (strong) party identity as conducive to straight-ticket ticket voting. We examine effects of these variables (their direct, mediating and moderating effects on split-ticket voting) as well as some control variables (education, age, media exposure etc.) employing structural equation modeling. The paper is been developed under the EC H2020 project “DEMOS”.