9630449 Loewenberg Scholars have identified two types of voting, sincere and tactical voting. Sincere voters vote for their most preferred party. Tactical voters may not vote for their most preferred party to insure that their least preferred party does not win the election. In proportional representation (PR) systems, the proportion of seats a party wins in the national legislature is determined by the proportion of votes the party receives. Given these rules, scholars have assumed that voters in a PR system would always vote sincerely. However, PR systems usually produce governments composed of a coalition of parties. This Doctoral Dissertation Research project hypothesizes that voters in PR systems my vote tactically to affect the composition of the governing coalition. As part of the research design the student conducts a series of voting experiments. Scholars have traditionally assumed that voters possessed neither the computational ability nor the information to vote tactically in a PR system. An experimental design provides an excellent environment to test such specific assumptions. The results of the experiments will result in improved theory and will generate better hypotheses. Understanding voting behavior in a PR system is important since most established and many emerging democracies use PR rules. ***
