The Mixed Electoral Systems - Hopes and Traps

Thirty years ago, New Zealand's electoral reform ushered in a "golden age" of mixed electoral systems. According to the title of the influential book by Shugart and Wattenberg, they were intended to combine "The Best of Both Worlds". They were also supposed to improve the quality of democracy. The purpose of our panel is to exchange experiences and summaries of this period. Have mixed systems, implemented in so many countries, lived up to the hopes placed in them? Are these hopes still there? Do the collected experiences indicate what are the strengths and weaknesses of such systems?
Electoral systems face many "traps" - unforeseen consequences of applied rules that generate questionable behaviors of parties, candidates, or voters. Three decades of experience with various variants of mixed systems allow us to identify such traps and seek remedies.
The panel will demonstrate how opinions on the electoral system differ between residents of countries that use MMP and those that use "classic" FPTP and PR systems. What is more, we investigate whether the possibility of casting two votes, with different functions from the voting system's point of view, is actually used by voters in the way intended by the system designers. Does this option offer an added value, allowing for a better expression of voters' will, or is it just a loophole, opening the way to ambiguous decisions? The panel will also show to what extent the expected changes in political actors' behavior are limited by the experiences gathered within previously used systems. What system corrections are possible in the face of such phenomena as surplus mandates and how do such systems cope in practice with reconciling proportionality and territorial representation? Does the ideological proximity of representatives still contradict geographical proximity or has a new quality really been created here?
The panel is an opportunity for a multifaceted assessment of mixed systems, the exchange of experiences among researchers from different countries, and the analysis of electoral systems from different but related perspectives.