Abstract
We study the primacy effects that occur when voters cast their votes because a candidate or party is listed first on a ballot. In the elections that we analyzed, there are three potential types of such effects that might occur when voters vote for (1) the first candidate listed on the ballot in single-member district (SMD) elections (candidate primacy); (2) the first party listed on the ballot in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections (party primacy); or (3) the first candidate on a party list in OLPR elections (list primacy). We estimated the party primacy effect (2) and established that there was no interaction between (2) and (3). A party primacy effect is especially difficult to estimate because parties’ positions on ballots are typically fixed in all multi-member districts (MMDs) and it is impossible to separate the first-position “bonus” from a party’s normal electoral performance. A rare natural experiment allowed us to estimate the primacy party bonus between 6.02 and 8.52% of all votes cast for the 2014 Polish local elections. We attribute the large size of such bonus to the great complexity of voting in the OLPR elections, especially the much longer ballots, voting in many simultaneous elections, and ballot design as a booklet rather than a sheet.
Highlights
The ballot order effect reflects how the position of a candidate or party on a ballot affects the number of votes they receive
Our goal is to provide the first estimate in the literature of the primacy effect for parties in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections
“Number of councils” = the total number of councils; “Council size” = average seats for the council’s size; “District magnitude” = average district magnitude, i.e., the average number of seats elected in a district; “Average parties” = average number of parties competing in OLPR; “Number of candidates” = average number of candidates on the ballot including single-candidate ballots in single-member district (SMD); “Ballot order” = the rule used for deciding the place on ballot for parties in OLPR or candidates in SMD elections; “boroughs” = smaller boroughs with no county status; “county-boroughs”” = larger boroughs that are counties
Summary
The ballot order effect reflects how the position of a candidate or party on a ballot affects the number of votes they receive. Our goal is to provide the first estimate in the literature of the primacy effect for parties in open-list proportional representation (OLPR) elections. We estimated the corresponding party primacy bonus associated with a party being listed first on the ballot for the Polish local elections of 2014. The bonus was defined as the difference between the percentages of actual votes cast for the first-listed party and the estimated percentages that a party would have received had there been no primacy effects. Our main hypothesis is that the party primacy bonus in OLPR elections is positive. The intuition behind the hypothesis is simple: Ballots in OLPR elections include many candidates, and the complexity of choices in OLPR elections motivates some voters to vote for the first-listed party. We estimated the party primacy bonus for both PiS and PSL. The final section concludes with a discussion and policy recommendations
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