Ballot position and election results: New evidence from a natural experiment

It is well-known that candidates listed first on the ballot paper tend to receive more votes than other candidates. However, experimental studies that confirm this truism mostly stem from first-past-the-post systems. Do we also find ballot position effects in PR systems where voters may vote for a party instead of a specific candidate? We investigate a natural experiment in Danish national elections involving more than 9,000 candidates on almost 100 different ballot papers. Our findings show that ballot positions, indeed, have a causal effect on election results in PR systems. Since Danish national elections constitute a least-likely case, our findings indicate that ballot position effects are much more empirically relevant than suggested by existing research.     

Electoral contexts that assist voter coordination: Ballot position effects in Poland

Hypothetically, in the open list PR system, all contestants, independently of their ballot position, have the same chance of winning a mandate. In practice, candidates placed at the top of the ballot enjoy a large surplus of votes. Their success can be explained by the primacy effect, in which the first ballot position acts as a focal point. The analysis of 6187 candidates running for the Polish Sejm in 2007 finds not only significant gains for top candidates, but that proximity to the upper end of the ballot likewise matters. It correspondingly discovers a weak benefit for candidates placed last on the list. Other sources of candidate advantage such as incumbency, capital city effect, age and gender are also investigated.     

Coping with complexity: Ballot position effects in the Finnish open-list proportional representation system

Many studies show that the order of candidates’ names on the ballot has an effect on voting. Less informed and indifferent voters may simplify the voting process by using the ballot position of candidates as a voting cue. By studying six parliamentary elections in Finland, this study first demonstrates that the relationship between ballot position and preference votes follows a reversed J-shaped curve. Candidates listed early on the ballot win the most preference votes, while candidates listed near the end have an advantage over those listed in the middle. Furthermore, the ballot position effect grows stronger with the complexity of the electoral environment. The ballot position effect increases as the number of candidates on the party list increases, the candidates-to-seats ratio increases and the number of incumbents on the list decreases.     

Come hell or high water: An investigation of the effects of a natural disaster on a local election

How is electoral support for incumbent candidates shaped by natural disasters? Do voters in districts newly recovering from a national disaster punish or reward incumbents for their response to the disaster when compared to their counterparts in unaffected districts? The City of Calgary is used here as a case study. On 20 June 2013, the Bow and Elbow rivers flooded in the Calgary, devastating 26 neighborhoods and displacing approximately 75,000 people, or 7 per cent of the city's population. Four months later, a municipal election was held. When analyzed as a natural experiment, results suggest that support for the incumbent mayor increased city-wide between the 2010 and the 2013 elections, but at a lower rate in areas that experienced residential flooding. However, the flood did not produce equivalent treatment and control groups, as flooded areas differ systematically from areas that were not flooded in ways key to the election outcome. When analyzed more conservatively, results show that the flood had no effect on incumbent support or voter turnout. Thus, this disaster introduces a note of caution into the literature examining the effects of natural disasters on electoral behavior.     

Confidence in an election authority and satisfaction with democracy: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment of a failed election in Sweden

Contemporary research on electoral integrity has focused on the functioning, evaluation, and legitimacy of electoral processes in emerging democracies. By contrast, this study investigates whether a failed election in a well-established democracy can affect individuals' evaluations of the electoral management body, the Election Authority, and whether those evaluations affect satisfaction with democracy. Using the case of a Swedish regional election in 2010 that had to be rerun due to procedural mistakes in the vote handling, we found that, in the short term, individuals’ confidence in the Election Authority was reduced after it was announced that the election had to be rerun because of the mistakes. Subsequently, this decreased confidence was strongly associated with less satisfaction with democracy at the regional and national level. As good news for the authority, after a successful rerun election, confidence rebounded to the levels prior to the failed election.     

Identifying the effect of mobilization on voter turnout through a natural experiment

Although numerous get-out-the-vote field experiments have identified the effects of particular mobilization tactics (e.g., canvassing, phone calls, direct mails) on voter turnout, we do not yet have a full understanding of the causal effect of overall mobilization. We study this by leveraging a natural experiment in Japan, in which the timing of a municipal election is as-if randomly assigned. The results show that almost concurrently held municipal elections boost these municipalities’ voter turnout in prefectural elections by one to two percentage points. We argue that some unique settings in Japan allow us not only to mitigate omitted variable bias but also to attribute the estimated effect only to mobilization, rather than the effects of cost sharing and psychological stimulus.     

Electoral consequences of declining participation: A natural experiment in Austria

Participation rates have declined sharply across developed democracies. But the precise impact of this decline on party systems has proven difficult to study due to endogeneity concerns. This paper seeks to address this issue by leveraging a natural experiment in Austrian parliamentary elections. By examining instances in which compulsory voting was gradually repealed in a federal setting, I isolate the causal relationship between turnout decline and subsequent shifts in party vote share. The findings suggest that turnout decline is not associated with a significant redistribution of votes between parties. The clearest visible effect is a consolidation of the party system, with a mild shift in votes from minor to mainstream parties. Evaluating the findings, the paper argues that characteristics of proportional representation systems insulate parties against the consequences of declining electoral participation.     

The unfortunate natural experiment in ballot design: The Scottish Parliamentary elections of 2007

The 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections were notable for the extensive variation across constituencies in rejected ballots (ranging from 1.90% to 12.09%). This paper uses an unfortunate natural experiment to identify the influence of ballot design on the occurrence of rejected ballots, or ‘residual votes’. In two electoral regions, visual prompts were removed and instructions were abbreviated on the (already poorly designed) ballot papers. Using zero-truncated negative binomial regression to model total residual votes as well as constituency and regional undervotes and overvotes, we find clear evidence that these changes made a major contribution to the extent of residual votes in constituencies within those regions. The findings emphasise that ballot design is not a trivial subject that can be neglected by electoral administrators.     

Ballot design and invalid votes: Evidence from Colombia

We examine the tendency for complex ballots to undermine the ability of voters to cast valid votes. Specifically, we investigate the role of ballot design in explaining the high rate of invalid votes in Colombia observed in 2007. We address this question first by looking at data from a study observing the use of alternate ballot designs in a controlled environment, varying the information voters have when attempting to cast the ballot. Our results show that there is an effect of the ballot design on the amount of invalid votes and that this effect varies with education level. We then examine the observed pattern of invalid votes in Colombia before and after the implementation of the ballot redesign. Our results suggest that the introduction of a ballot with improved usability was associated with a significant decline in the number of invalid votes and that a rural-urban difference observed before the new ballot was no longer present.     

Treated politicians,treated voters: A natural experiment on political budget cycles

Although pre-electoral political manipulation of the budget — the political budget cycle (PBC) — has been long investigated by scholars, empirical findings are mixed at best. This is partly because of the non-random nature of election timing. There also exist ongoing debates over how the budget is manipulated for electoral purposes. We address these issues by exploiting a natural experiment in Japan, where the timing of both executive and legislative elections in municipalities is fixed, staggered, and as good as random, and by using the detailed items of the municipal budget. We find that total and capital expenditures follow the PBC, but tax revenue does not. We also find that executive elections are associated with the PBC, but legislative elections are not. Against the conventional wisdom that democratic or developed countries are free from the PBC, our case of Japan offers an intriguing exception.     

Public transit and the spatial distribution of minority employment: Evidence from a natural experiment

A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area's heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner‐city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two‐wave longitudinal survey of firms, with the first wave of interviews conducted immediately before the opening of service, and the second wave approximately a year later. Within‐firm changes in the propensity to hire minority workers for firms near the station were compared with those located farther away. Also estimated was the effect of employer distance to the new stations on changes in propensity to hire minorities. Results indicate a sizable increase in the hiring of Latinos near the new stations, but little evidence of an effect on black hiring rates. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

In search of enduring information effects: Evidence from a ten-week panel experiment

The extent to which the electorate uses issue information to update their candidate evaluations over the course of political campaigns has often raised questions about citizen competence. Using a ten-week panel experiment designed to capture the low-information context of most congressional races this study contributes to our understanding of when and by what processes issue information produces enduring effects. Findings reveal that when voters need to assess an ideologically moderate candidate, they rely less on partisan cues but instead of storing issue information in long-term memory – either via a memory-based or on-line process – considerations in short-term memory remained one of the most powerful predictors of candidate evaluation, particularly when new issue information deviated from partisan norms.     

Election observer effects: A field experiment in the Russian Duma election of 2011

The literature on elections and election monitoring is divided between those who take a skeptical view, suggesting that monitors are often political rather than objective in their judgments, and those who see monitors as a real force for cleaner, more honest elections. Studies that use field experiments to look for the effect of monitors generally support the optimists, indicating that the mere presence of election observers can have powerful effects. This is surprising given the extent of the resources available to incumbents who wish to conduct electoral fraud. We present the results of an experiment in which 768 observers were randomly assigned to polling stations in 21 cities in Russia in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Unlike most previous studies of election observers, our results suggest that observer effects on turnout and vote for the ruling party are small. The results suggest the need to study more carefully the circumstances that shape the impact of observation missions.     

The effects of populism as a social identity frame on persuasion and mobilisation: Evidence from a 15-country experiment

This article investigates the impact of populist messages on issue agreement and readiness for action in 15 countries (N = 7,286). Specifically, populist communicators rely on persuasive strategies by which social group cues become more salient and affect people's judgment of and political engagement with political issues. This strategy is called ‘populist identity framing’ because the ordinary people as the in-group is portrayed as being threatened by various out-groups. By blaming political elites for societal or economic problems harming ordinary people, populist communicators engage in anti-elitist identity framing. Another strategy is to blame immigrants for social problems – that is, exclusionist identity framing. Finally, right-wing political actors combine both cues and depict an even more threatening situation of the ordinary people as the in-group. Based on social identity theory, an experimental study in 15 European countries shows that most notably the anti-elitist identity frame has the potential to persuade voters. Additionally, relative deprivation makes recipients more susceptible to the mobilising impact of the populist identity frames.     

Is transparency an effective anti-corruption strategy? Evidence from a field experiment in India

Can freedom of information laws be harnessed by underprivileged members of society and used to obtain greater access to basic public goods that are otherwise attainable only through bribery? Drawing on a field experiment on access to ration cards among New Delhi's slum dwellers, we demonstrate that India's recently adopted freedom of information law is almost as effective as bribery in helping the poor to secure access to a basic public service. We find support for the theoretical proposition that greater transparency and voice lowers corruption even in highly hierarchical and unequal societies.     

Business cycle and political election outcomes: Evidence from the Chilean democracy

This paper explores the influence of economic variables in Chilean presidential elections. We use a panel where the dependent variable corresponds to the share of the vote obtained by the incumbent at a municipal level in the presidential elections of 1989, 1993 and 1999. We focus on the unemployment rate and the output gap and find that both have a significant influence on the vote. We also find that if the mayor is from the same coalition as the incumbent, people will further punish the incumbent when regional unemployment is above national unemployment.     

The effect of socioeconomic policy and competence messages on populist radical right support: Evidence from a pre-election survey experiment

Does highlighting socioeconomic policy considerations or mainstream parties’ government competence reduce support for populist radical right (PRR) parties? Such “defuse” messages may attract PRR voters without alienating mainstream parties’ core electorate and thus, have advantages over an accommodative strategy. This study tests four “defuse” messages in an original survey experiment on a sample of 1,786 likely PRR voters in the context of the 2017 German federal election. The findings show that potential PRR voters are hardly swayed by these messages. This result is in notable contrast to findings from prior experimental studies about the malleability of PRR support. Exploratory analyses suggest that some of these null findings may mask heterogeneities. Both respondents who were surveyed during the first days of fieldwork and those with less political knowledge responded to some treatments in the expected way. Overall, these findings point to a limited responsiveness of PRR voters to “defuse” messages.     

Popular evaluations of election quality in Africa: Evidence from Nigeria

Despite the important consequences of citizens' election quality perceptions on political behavior and political attitudes, very little is known about how citizens formulate their perceptions of election quality. In this paper, I assess the correlates of citizens' perceptions of election quality. I suggest that the performance of election-related institutions is an important correlate of citizens' election quality perceptions. However, citizens' experience with electoral irregularities, and partisan affiliation also matter. I test these hypotheses in the context of the 2007 Nigerian general elections using survey data from Afrobarometer and International Foundation for Electoral Systems. The findings provide robust support for the hypotheses. Most importantly, the results indicate that the performance of electoral management bodies is associated with citizens' assessment of election quality in Africa and that citizens demand electoral management bodies with impartiality and professionalism.     

The inconsequence of negative statehouse evaluations on ballot measures: Evidence from survey experiments

Existing scholarship about ballot measure voting and elite cuegivers suggests that the express endorsement of an unpopular legislature on a statewide ballot measure will depress voter support. Despite seven tests across two decades on both high- and low-profile measures, it did not. This null finding is in keeping with macro-level patterns of strong public support for the more than 4000 legislative referrals approved by voters in the past century. Consequently, we propose that the influence of an elite endorsement on voter behavior is more complicated than past research suggests. Specifically, in keeping with the seminal observation made by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (1995) that American political cynicism is more a matter of distaste for certain political practices than for actual political institutions, we suspect that when voters are overwhelmed by policy proposals that are both unfamiliar and complex, they may find assurance in the imprimatur of their General Assembly.