White Voters, Black Schools: Structuring Racial Choices with a Checklist Ballot

Abstract

cation of resources. This study shows how an electoral device can help overcome racial hostility generated by competition over resources, even in the Deep South. Heresthetic, according to William Riker, is the art of strategically structuring electoral processes in order to manipulate outcomes. As he writes, [W]inners induce by more than rhetorical attractions. Typically they because they have set up the situation in such a way that other people will want to join them?or will feel forced by circumstances to join them?even without any persuasion at all. And this is what heresthetic is about: structuring the world so you can win (1986, ix). Riker offers a dozen real-world examples of how heresthetical manipula? tion works, most involving legislative politics and how rules devised by sawy legislators influence their peers. But it is striking that none of his ex? amples come from elections at the mass-level, which are not so easily manipulated, in part because the rules are so much less fluid. The basic logic of heresthetic should apply to mass voting, and other political scientists have shown, in different contexts, that the form that a ballot takes can influence how votes are cast. Such things as the order in which candidates appear on a ballot (Taebel 1975; Miller and Krosnick 1998), the ability to vote party line with a single mark (Hamilton and Ladd 1996), and whether a ballot is organized by party column or office blocks (Walker 1966) can affect how people vote. Even something as simple as whether candidates are lined up in one column or two, as some Florida officials learned after the 2000 election, can affect outcomes, if only by accident. Notable about the literature on ballot forms is that the findings are so qualified. Ballot form appears to have its biggest impact among those least politically anchored and most easily manipulated. Moreover, political sci? entists have shown that the effect of ballot form is most pronounced in low-information situations where the usual cues, like party identification and incumbency, are unavailable: nonpartisan elections, party primaries, open seat elections, multi-member legislative elections, and races at the bottom of the ballot. As Miller and Krosnick summarize their findings