Equity in Politics: Name Placement on Ballots

Abstract

A basic element of any democratic government is its electoral process. The honesty, fairness, and neutrality of elections help determine the image of a government. In virtually every type of legislative body one can trace a nearly continuous preoccupation over the years with problems arising from the way elections are conducted, in the hope that they can be made more equitable or at least seem to be so. That many a close race ends up in the courts, on one theory or another, illustrates the seriousness with which the electoral process is viewed in a democratic society. The effect of the position of candidates' names on a ballot and how that position is determined has long been a matter of concern. Suspicions about the importance of position on the ballot must have existed long before the first scientific studies of position effect were done. In fact, in 1910 Woodrow Wilson noted that some candidates had changed their names to gain advantage on alphabetically arranged ballots.' And even though the issue of position effect may have first become a matter of concern with regard to positional bias on ballots, most research has focused on position effect in other contexts such as the construction of questionnaires, multiple-choice tests, and displays in supermarkets. In 1929 Mathews discussed differences in response to attitude scales as a function of the order of presentation. He showed that there were a significantly larger number of responses on the left-hand end of the