Ballot Access Research Articles

Party system erosion: Evidence from Peru

Weakly institutionalized party systems are a defining feature of third-wave democracies. Yet, in some countries like Peru, party weakness is not a static equilibrium but rather part of a dynamic process of “party system erosion” in which weak parties become weaker over time as independents come to dominate subnational posts. As I argue, party system erosion is driven by a particular configuration of institutional factors—weak party brands, ease of ballot access, and limited partisan control over resource distribution. These institutional features increase the likelihood that experienced candidates will run as independents. When these candidates are elected, they obtain more intergovernmental discretionary transfers, which are used to improve performance and maintain clientelistic networks. This resource advantage of independent officials further weakens party brands and reduces experienced candidates’ incentives to run with parties in future elections. I test this theory using a data set of 80,000 subnational officials and a regression discontinuity design.

Understanding the Adoption of Voter Identification Laws in the American States

Recently, many states have reversed the decades-long trend of facilitating ballot access by enacting a wave of laws requesting or requiring identification from registrants before they vote. Identification laws, however, are not an entirely new phenomenon. We offer new theoretical insights regarding how changes in political power influence the adoption of identification laws. In the most extensive analysis to date, we use event history analysis to examine why states adopted a range of identification laws over the past several decades. We consistently find that the propensity to adopt is greatest when control of the governor’s office and legislature switches to Republicans (relationships not previously identified), and that this likelihood increases further as the size of Black and Latino populations in the state expands. We also find that federal legislation in the form of the Help America Vote Act seems to enhance the effects of switches in partisan control.

The Costs and Benefits of Party Switching in Mexico

AbstractAre party switchers successful at furthering their careers? Most research on party switching focuses on the decision to switch and with which party to affiliate. Less attention is paid to the costs and benefits of switching parties. Moreover, previous research examining the electoral success of party switchers has often ignored how costs vary between the candidate selection process and the general election. This study addresses this gap in the literature by using original data on the careers of Mexican federal deputies to examine the costs and benefits of switching parties at the candidate selection stage and during general elections. The results suggest that party switchers are more successful at winning ballot access than nonswitchers but are less likely to win office. These results help explain why ambitious politicians would switch parties, given the known risks of changing party affiliation.

Electoral systems, ethnic diversity and party systems in developing democracies

Party system nationalization is often viewed as critical to national unity, the production of public goods, and may have implications for democratic success. This paper assesses the impact of ethnic diversity and electoral rules in 74 economically developing democracies. Contrary to past studies, majoritarian electoral systems heighten the tendency of ethnic diversity to reduce nationalization while proportional representation greatly reduces its impact. Presidential systems produce higher levels of nationalization than parliamentary systems but the effect reverses as the number of presidential candidates increases. Though ethnic party bans may increase nationalization, ballot access requirements, the level of freedom, and relative prosperity have no effect.

Voting is Association

What’s the relationship between the First Amendment right to expressive association and the Fourteenth Amendment right to vote? It’s closer than you probably think. The Supreme Court employs a balancing test in constitutional challenges to a wide variety of election practices, including ballot access rules, blanket primaries, and voter identification. This standard is commonly referred to as “Anderson-Burdick” for the two main cases from which it derives, Anderson v. Celebrezze and Burdick v. Takushi. Commonly overlooked is that the Anderson-Burdick standard is the offspring of a union between the Fourteenth Amendment right to vote and the First Amendment right of association. This article explores the origins, development, and subsequent obscuration of the relationship between voting and associational rights. Central to this story are two opinions by Justice John Paul Stevens, the first (Anderson) written early in his tenure on the Supreme Court and the second (Crawford v. Marion County Election Board) near the end. After canvassing the Court's voting-association cases, the article argues for renewed recognition of this link when it comes to contemporary burdens on participation, closing with some thoughts on the applicability of the First Amendment right of association to partisan gerrymandering claims. Voting restrictions implicate expressive association to the extent they prevent voters from joining together with like-minded others, candidates, and political parties. Reviving the voting-association link would cast current voting rights cases in a different light, one that more accurately reflects the real-world dynamic in these cases. These disputes are not simply or even mainly about an individual’s right to cast a ballot. They are best understood as inter-party disputes, in which political insiders seek to block outsiders from aggregating their votes so as to challenge the dominant party. The focus would accordingly shift to a voting law or practice’s disparate impact on likely supporters of the non-dominant party, a question that has been in the background but not the foreground of most recent cases.

Поддержка выдвижения кандидатов: исторический контекст, проблемные вопросы и поиск решения

Three forms of supporting of nomination of candidates have developed in the process of establishment of the Russian electoral legislation (collection of electors’ signatures, results of previous elections, municipal filter) which in the author’s opinion do not always display such support and whose practical application gives rise to certain problems. In this regard, in the author’s opinion, such forms of support of nomination of candidates as results of previous elections and municipal filter should be eliminated from the Russian legislation. However, a threshold during registration of candidates is necessary, but only to prevent the candidates from abusing their ballot access and exclude those candidates who stand for the elections not to be elected, but for other personal purposes. Electoral pledge while preserving the signatures collection for those who can’t afford the electoral pledge might be an effective threshold for candidates who abuse their ballot access.

Don’t Whine, Organize!

Politics is not about perfection. Anyone who has ever faced the choice of a not-so-good Democrat running against a horrendous Republican knows what I’m talking about. In the vernacular, it’s the lesser-evil dilemma, and most people handle it sensibly. You do the best you can at any given moment.But finding ourselves up against the lesser-evil problem means that we may have missed earlier points of intervention.Primaries are won by many fewer votes than general elections are, and require less money. Backing progressive champions—candidates whom we think of as Working Families Democrats—in primaries is the single best way to solve this problem. Progressive leaders like Bill de Blasio don’t come out of nowhere.Running for office is a skill that can be learned and mastered. If we cede the field to the wealthy and those running in service to their agenda, we can never truly win. We need a new generation of progressives to run: civil rights leaders and environmental justice advocates, community organizers and educators. You might even consider running yourself. Some of the best leaders we have are local elected officials—city councillors and school board members and state legislators—who said they’d never want to be a candidate. But when they didn’t see anyone else who really represented them, they stepped up.Organizers and campaigners of all stripes can set the stage for an election and change the terrain on which the contest is fought. Occupy did it. So have the DREAMers, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the fast food workers. There’s a reason we’re seeing victories on raising the minimum wage in cities and states: a big part has been the bravery of workers walking off their jobs and demanding it. That has created space for candidates to move on the issue.Let’s be honest. With a rising tide of big money in politics and voter suppression, none of this is easy. That’s why we need a constant focus on fixing the rules. There are voting rights laws that determine who can participate; districts that determine whom you can vote for; ballot access laws that determine who can run; and, above all, campaign finance laws that determine whose voice gets heard. We can’t afford to ignore any of those fights.So the next time you are faced with unappealing choices in the voting booth, don’t despair. We can’t walk away or abstain, as that only yields to our enemies. But before pulling the lever for the candidate whose views are closest to yours, however imperfect they may be, you should also pause and resolve to get to work—that night, before you go to sleep—on setting up a better choice for the next election. And the one after that, too.

Waste Not, Vote Not (for Third Parties)?

I develop and demonstrate evidence for a theory of strategic, state-based voting in American presidential elections. Such voting occurs when individuals anticipate the behavior of their neighbors and cater their voting decisions accordingly. I turn to an infrequently-studied phenomenon to uncover evidence for this theory: support for minor-party presidential candidates. The Electoral College in the United States determines the victors of presidential elections. Since most states allocate their electors on a winner-takes-all basis, and because voting outcomes in some states are more unpredictable than in others, presidential candidates tend to cluster their campaign resources in competitive or “battleground” states. Voters who reside in these states live in different campaign environments than voters who reside in uncompetitive, “blackout” states. I suggest that voters in competitive states anticipate the decisions of their fellow residents and perceive that their votes have higher pivot values than votes in other states. The perceived value of votes is expected to vary across states due to differences in electoral competitiveness and the winner-takes-all nature of awarding Electoral College votes. As a result, I propose that voters in competitive states are more likely to vote strategically than voters in other states. To test my hypotheses, I turn to the election returns of third-party candidates in two recent presidential elections. I find that support for minor parties is positively associated with wider two-party margins of victory, after adjusting for ballot access and campaign resources.

Who Makes Voting Convenient? Explaining the Adoption of Early and No-Excuse Absentee Voting in the American States

AbstractRecent elections have witnessed substantial debate regarding the degree to which state governments facilitate access to the polls. Despite this newfound interest, however, many of the major reforms aimed at increasing voting convenience (i.e., early voting and no-excuse absentee voting) were implemented over the past four decades. Although numerous studies examine their consequences (on turnout, the composition of the electorate, and/or electoral outcomes), we know significantly less about the factors leading to the initial adoption of these policies. We attempt to provide insights into such motivations using event history analysis to identify the impact of political and demographic considerations, as well as diffusion mechanisms, on which states opted for easier ballot access. We find that adoption responded to some factors signaling the necessity of greater voting convenience in the state, and that partisanship influenced the enactment of early voting but not no-excuse absentee voting procedures.

Sore Loser Laws and Congressional Polarization

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or as nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological divide between the major parties.

You have to pay to play: Candidate and party responses to the high cost of elections in Japan

What effect does the financial cost of running for office have on candidate entry decisions, and does it differ depending on a candidate's motivations for running? We use a regression discontinuity design and panel data analysis to estimate the causal effect of campaign costs on candidate entry in Japan, where the amount of money required as a deposit for ballot access increased periodically to become one of the highest in the world, and a considerable part of campaign costs. We find that candidates from the major office-seeking parties were likely to be replaced after losing the deposit, and that these parties nominated fewer candidates following increases in the deposit amount. However, we find no such deterrent effect for fringe candidates. This finding calls into question the effectiveness of the deposit at fulfilling its supposed purpose, and sheds light on the differences between the financial and strategic coordination incentives that influence the nomination decisions of parties.

Ballot Access Laws and the Decline of American Third-Parties

Party and legal scholars often argue that ballot access requirements and other state-level election laws are primary reasons that third-parties have declined in importance in the United States. According to this argument, as ballot access laws got more difficult over the twentieth century, fewer minor parties were able to run, and those that overcame these onerous restrictions had few resources left to run effective campaigns. We traced the ballot access laws of each state from the enactment of the Australian ballot to the present and analyzed their impact on elections to the House of Representatives from 1890 to 2010. We found that while these laws got more difficult over the twentieth century, they had little impact on the electoral fortunes of third-parties. We conclude that these state election laws did not cause the dramatic decline of third-parties over the past 100 years.

Lone fighters: Intraparty competition, interparty competition, and candidates' vote seeking efforts in open-ballot PR elections

In their seminal paper, Carey and Shugart (1995) argue that electoral rules predetermine whether election campaigns are predominantly characterized by competition between parties, or among candidates within parties. In particular, electoral systems that provide weak party control over ballot access, that allow voters to express a preference vote for individual candidates, and that select candidates on the basis of the votes they earn individually are supposed to offer strong incentives for candidates to cultivate a personal vote. In this paper, we investigate Carey and Shugart's original claims about the instrumental motivations of candidates in open-ballot proportional representation (PR) elections using survey data and election statistics from the 2007 Swiss National Council elections. As opposed to previous work, we develop and employ more direct and valid measures of intra- and interparty incentives to wage personal campaigns. Our empirical results suggest that the candidates' campaign focus and expenditures are closely linked to intraparty competition, but not interparty competition. Previously used proxies of intraparty competition, such as district magnitude or the number of candidates on a party list (or ratios thereof), turn out to be but remotely related to the candidates' campaign behavior.

Building competition and breaking cartels? The legislative and judicial regulation of political parties in common law democracies

This article presents a comparative analysis of the legal regulation of political parties as competitors in, and as entrants to, the electoral contest. Laws that regulate ballot access and the registration of political parties as ‘official’ electoral actors are examined in four established common law democracies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The article explores the ways in which these regulations are used to control the degree of party competition in each system, and how some specific laws might privilege some parties (for example, incumbents) over others. Specifically, the article analyses the role that the courts play as interpreters and adjudicators of these laws in different constitutional contexts – shaping the contours of party competition and legitimate political activity based on their understandings of constitutional freedoms, effective elections and governance arrangements, and particular normative conceptions of the role of political parties in modern societies.

Electoral competition and endogenous barriers to entry

As institutions matter for political and economic outcomes, they are (at least partly) shaped by the interests of political agents acting under these limitations. However, empirical evidence documenting such endogenous change of institutions is scarce. We address the issue by examining the link between the degree of electoral competition and the design of ballot access restrictions in the United States. Exploiting exogenous variation in electoral competition at the state level induced by the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, our main finding is that ballot access rules have been systematically tightened in response to stronger electoral competition.

Ballot Access, Vlast’ Dominance, and Pomoshchnik Political Culture in Russia’s Subnational Executive Elections

Executive elections have returned to Russia’s regions after eight years, during which time gubernatorial positions at the subnational level were filled by presidential appointment. These are critically important positions for ruling Russia, and thus controlling them is no less important to the Kremlin now than they were in 2004 when Putin abolished elections for these positions in order to strengthen the vlast’ vertikal . Although only 13 regions have held executive elections in this new era, vlast’ has won every contest. This paper examines an important aspect of how vlast’ maintains such electoral control. It uses statistical analysis to examine the importance of candidacy manipulations as an instance of “administrative resources” that the Kremlin employs to secure its desired electoral outcomes. The finding is that the maximization of vlast’’s electoral dominance is not as closely related to blocking the access of opposition candidates who want to get on the ballot as it is to the paucity of opposition candidates who even try to get onto ballot. Although decisions not to seek ballot access cannot be observed directly, the paper proposes an explanation for variations in the rate of opposition-candidate emergence: 10cal political culture that may enjoin politicians to define themselves as helpers, not autonomous agents or competitors. The paper then uses a case study of Briansk oblast to elaborate the evolution of such a “ pomoshchnik culture,” and hypothesizes how it can affect attitudes about political competition among regional political elites.

Ballot Access Rules and the Entry of Women Candidates in State Legislative Primaries

Journal of Anthropology and Archaeology is a peer-reviewed international journal, which publishes original papers promoting theoretical, methodological and empirical developments in the discipline of socio-cultural anthropology.

Sore Loser Laws and Congressional Polarization

To enhance explanations for party polarization in the U.S. Congress, we focus on an unappreciated legal structure known as the sore loser law. By restricting candidates who lose partisan primaries from subsequently appearing on the general election ballot as independents or nominees of other parties, these laws give greater control over ballot access to the party bases, thus producing more extreme major party nominees. Using several different measures of candidate and legislator ideology, we find that sore loser laws account for as much as a tenth of the ideological distance between the major parties.

Do barriers to candidacy reduce political competition? Evidence from a bachelor’s degree requirement for legislators in Pakistan

In the 2002 election, candidates for Pakistan’s federal legislature had to possess at least a bachelor’s degree. This policy disqualified 60 out of the 207 incumbent legislators from running for election again. Using a difference-in-differences approach with panel data on all electoral constituencies in Pakistan, I find that this ballot access restriction does not affect political competition across all constituencies with disqualified incumbents equally. Stronger political competition is defined as a larger number of candidates contesting election, a smaller vote share and vote margin for the winning candidate, and a less concentrated candidate field, as measured by a Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) of vote shares. Competition declined significantly in constituencies where the disqualified incumbent belonged to a small party and where literacy levels were lower (signifying a smaller pool of substitute candidates). However, political competition increased in areas where the disqualified incumbent was stronger in terms of his winning vote margin.

The Place of Competition in American Election Law, in the Marketplace of Democracy

This forthcoming book chapter defines the problem of diminished political competition, describes the relevant legal analogies concerning regulation of economic competition, and explains how the law shapes the competitive environment for elections. It also details how Supreme Court justices have sometimes tried to incorporate competitiveness concerns into their election law decisions in cases concerning ballot access, redistricting, campaign finance, party reform, and term limits. For the most part, constitutional law proves to be both a blunt and a coarse instrument for addressing excesses of partisan greed or self-interest, but justices of varying ideological leanings have invoked such concerns (usually in dissent) to highlight why one or another election law violates the Constitution.