Abstract
Institutional barriers frustrate third-party challenges to major-party dominance in American politics. Conventional wisdom claims that the ballot access petitioning requirement hurts minor parties. This claim, however, conflates two dimensions of third-party success: (a) ability to get on the ballot and (b) ability of actual candidates to win votes. The requirement is hypothesized to have a negative effect on the first dimension but a positive effect on the second. Modeling these two dimensions separately gives evidence of cross-cutting effects. The first equation is a probit model of entry that shows third-party candidates are more likely to enter when the requirement is low. The second equation is an OLS regression, which only includes the subsample of districts where at least one third-party candidate gained ballot access, that shows third-party candidates win more votes in districts with a higher requirement.
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