Do Nonpartisan Ballots Racialize Candidates Evaluations in Low-Information Elections?

Abstract

At last count, U.S. voters were responsible for directly electing more than 510,000 public officials. Few of these contests feature lively campaigns or attract substantial media attention, leaving voters to make decisions with limited information. We argue that the strategies voters use to do so depend in part on ballot design — in particular, the presence or absence of partisan labels. Using two “Who Said What?” experiments, we show that voters engage in social categorization — and do so on the basis of race and ethnicity when candidates differ in their demographic background. We also find, however, that the presence of party labels shape the degree to which voters categorize candidates based on their race and ethnicity. Our results suggest that efforts to increase minority representation should look beyond electoral institutions — such as district versus at-large elections — to the structure of the ballot itself.