A Taxonomy of Mixed Electoral Systems

Abstract

The “father of taxonomy,” the eighteenth-century biologist Carl Linnaeus, organized the living world by collecting together and labeling similar organisms into increasingly detailed classes. Although he initially believed that the number of species—the most specific category of living creatures—was fixed, he later recognized that hybrids of existing species could produce new, previously unseen ones.¹ The emergence and proliferation of mixed electoral systems has generated a similar quandary in the election studies literature. As we noted in chapter 1, some of the analytical literature on mixed electoral systems has emphasized their similarity to existing “species” of election rules. The contamination literature, however, suggests that mixed electoral systems constitute a new species of electoral rules, emerging from the miscegenation of majoritarian and proportional systems. How do we distinguish among different forms—or species—of election rules?²