We explore how the ordering of candidates on ballots influences election outcomes. We estimate that being listed first on the ballot increases a candidate’s likelihood of winning office by 9.8 percent. This first candidate advantage comes at the expense of candidates listed in the middle of the ballot. We use multi-winner elections to isolate the mechanisms leading to order-effects. We find that the performance of a candidate is both position- and history-dependent: candidates perform better in certain positions and when listed immediately after lower quality candidates. Our results suggest that policy makers should use more sophisticated rotation schemes to mitigate order-effects in elections.
This paper uses discontinuities imposed by voting-age restrictions to identify the effect of past eligibility on subsequent participation decisions and partisan identification. It compares participation decisions and partisan affiliations of individuals who turned eighteen just before past elections with those who turned eighteen just after. It presents three main findings. First, eligibility to vote in the 2000 presidential election increases the probability of 2004 election participation by 3.0 to 4.5 percent. Second, 2000 eligibility increases the probability of registering as a Democrat, while significantly reducing the probability of registering as an Independent. Third, voting-age restrictions continue to affect future participation and partisan identification for several election cycles after a voter first becomes eligible.
Research has found that priming can influence voting behavior, but almost all this work has focused on media agenda-setting. Building on psychological research on behavioral priming, we suggest a broader set of contextual primes can influence vote choice. Specifically, we examine whether the type of polling place in which people vote (e.g. church or school) can influence vote choice. Using data from Arizona’s 2000 general election, we found that voters were more likely to favor raising the state sales tax to support education if they voted in schools, as opposed to other types of polling locations. This effect persisted even when controlling for voters’ political views, demographics, and unobservable characteristics of individuals living near schools. We extended these findings with a voting experiment in which people were randomly assigned to different environmental primes. Our results suggest that greater attention should be given to subtle environmental influences on voting.
This paper focuses on the ability of agenda-setters in direct democracy to gain favorable outcomes by strategically timing elections. Because the composition of the remainder of the ballot induces different subsets of the electorate to vote, scheduling initiatives or referenda for different elections will produce different median voters. Agenda-setters will thus schedule initiatives and referenda for elections that generate their most preferred outcome. Consistent with the theory, it is demonstrated that the use of special elections for Wisconsin school referenda from 1990 - 2006 are related to differences in the revealed preferences of school districts’ electorates in low and high turnout elections.
