Ballot Structure Research Articles

Election symbols and vote choice: evidence from India

Abstract A large literature has shown that ballot order and ballot structure can influence vote choice. We focus on another behavioral cue for voting, the symbols that are assigned to candidates in many democracies. We take advantage of a naturally occurring experiment in India, where independent candidates can choose from a list of free symbols and conflicting choices are resolved by a drawing of lots. We find that winning the draw has a substantial positive effect on vote share. We also find some evidence that candidates attempt to choose their symbols strategically, for instance choosing household goods common in their constituencies.

Ballot structure and political selection. Evidence from changes in electoral rules

This paper studies the effect of different ballot structures in proportional representation systems on the educational attainment of elected politicians as a proxy for their “ability”. By exploiting the Italian electoral reform that switched from open to blocked lists of candidates, the difference-in-differences analysis shows that the reform lowered the educational attainment of national politicians compared to the counterfactual (regional politicians). The dynamic impact of the reform is persistent over time, and it is robust to several concerns. The estimates account for the changes in the party system due to the “Clean hands” judicial inquiry against political corruption that began in 1992. The voters’ choice of better politicians than political parties seems to be the most likely mechanism behind the results.

How Open Lists Undermine the Electoral Support of Cohesive Parties

AbstractHow does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally divided Christian Democrats gain votes at the expense of the cohesive Alternative for Germany when open lists are used and candidate positions are known. For individuals who are equally attracted to both parties, switching is most likely if their immigration preferences lie near the midpoint between the two parties. Overall, our analysis establishes conditions under which ballot structure can affect the electoral performance of parties in general, and that of the populist right in particular.

Ballot structure, district magnitude and descriptive representation: the case of New Zealand local council elections

ABSTRACT It is sometimes claimed that the use of preferential voting facilitates more effective representation of under-represented groups than that generated by the first-past-the-post (FPP) system, particularly in combination with higher district magnitude. This claim is tested using unique observational data. Local government elections in New Zealand are conducted using either the single transferable vote (STV) or first-past-the-post, providing the opportunity to compare representation of women and Indigenous Māori across the two sets of councils. When combined with higher district magnitude, STV may sometimes promote the election of women, but has no effects on the election of Māori. The advantages of high district magnitude STV in promoting descriptive representation are counteracted by lack of coordination in candidate nomination and voting because these local electoral contests are predominantly nonpartisan.

Institutions or the Societal Setting? Explaining Invalid Voting in Local Elections in Sweden

Research on invalid voting has expanded over the past few years. Scholars largely agree on the most important determinants of invalid voting, foremost compulsory voting, quality of democracy, and ballot structure. However, disagreement prevails concerning several factors; more exactly, whether the effect is positive or negative. We examine determinants of invalid voting in the four most recent local elections in a single country, Sweden, all municipalities included. Applying a subnational research design allows us to control for several determinants that have been reported to be of significance in explaining varying levels of invalid voting, and, consequently, to examine factors with theoretically contradictory directions of effects. Two theoretical models of invalid voting are tested, an institutional and a societal model, each consisting of four variables. The latter explains considerably more of the variation in the dependent variable than the former. The most important determinant is education: higher levels of education among the population decrease the share of invalid votes. Concerning the institutional model, only district magnitude significantly affects the dependent variable, indicating that larger district magnitude depresses invalid voting. However, the effect disappears when societal variables are included, due to higher levels of education among the population in municipalities with high district magnitudes. Proportion of the electorate born abroad also significantly affects levels of invalid voting; higher proportions decrease invalid voting. We suggest that this is a consequence of political sophistication, interest, and being politically informed combined with who decides to vote and who decides to abstain amongst immigrants.

Electoral incentives for territorial representation in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT While many citizens are indifferent about the EU, most MEPs are invisible in national politics and European Parliament elections are not fought based on parliamentary activity records, some legislators still pursue territorial interests or foster constituency linkages. What explains such behavior? Drawing on written questions data from the 6th and the 7th terms of the European Parliament (EP) this article shows that despite the virtual absence of an electoral connection in EP elections, electoral system features, and electoral marginality influence the MEPs’ engagement in geographical representation. Electorally marginal MEPs ask more questions on regional and national topics as do MEPs elected from STV systems. There is no evidence for a differential effect of district magnitude depending on ballot structure.

Blockchain-based Electronic Voting System with Special Ballot and Block Structures that Complies with Indonesian Principle of Voting

Blockchain technology could be implemented not only in digital currency, but also in other fields. One such implementation is in democratic life, namely voting. This research focuses on designing a blockchain-based electronic voting system for medium to large-scale usage that complies with law, specifically voting principles in Indonesia. In this research, we proposed the following: a ballot design as block transaction employing UUID version 4, a modified block structure using SHA3-256 hash algorithm, and a voting protocol. The minimum length of a ballot is 43 bytes (excluding ECDSA signature) if one character is used as candidate’s identifier and timestamp is stored as integer. We built a simulation program using Python-based Django web framework to cast 10,000 votes and mine them into blocks. Tampered transactions in each block could be detected and restored by synchronizing data with another node. We also evaluated the proposed system. By using this system, voters can exercise voting principles in Indonesia: direct, public, free, confidential, honest, and fair.

Preference vote and intra-party competition in open list PR systems

Open list proportional representation (PR) systems require that candidates seek personal votes in order to be successful. This feature of the system is considered to lead to intense competition among co-partisans and, ultimately, to weak electoral and legislative parties, narrow public policies, localism, clientelism, and corruption. We examine the distribution of personal votes among candidates from the same party for seven elections to the Brazilian national chamber of deputies (1990–2014). These elections are widely seen as hyper-competitive, particularly among candidates from the same list. Yet, the patterns in the data are not compatible with such a view. We find that the level of overall competition is considerably lower than the absolute number of parties and candidates competing would suggest. More significantly, we find that the number of viable candidates within party lists is limited and that their votes are distributed in such a way that indicates a contained competition among co-partisans during the election. These findings add to recent work that builds a more nuanced view of ballot structure, competition, and personalism.

Beyond the Dichotomous Vote: Can Expressive Ballots Increase Ideological Congruence and Decrease Parliamentary Polarization?

AbstractAs scholars explore opportunities for democratic renewal, the potential of ballot structures to improve the quality of representation has been largely neglected. We argue that expressive ballots can improve the congruence of political preferences between voters and their vote choice and, subsequently, decrease parliamentary polarization. Recognizing that voters’ political preferences are more complex than a dichotomous party-vote allows, we propose the ‘assembly ballot’, which allows voters to choose their ‘ideal parliament’ by distributing 150 parliamentary seats across all participating parties. To assess the consequences of the assembly ballot for ideological congruence and parliamentary composition, we conducted a survey experiment with over 16,000 respondents around the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections in which respondents cast a vote in a mock-election using the assembly ballot or a closed-list PR ballot. Results show that ideological congruence is, on average, significantly higher for voters voting with the assembly ballot for both the left–right dimension and the cultural dimension, while also producing a more centripetal, less polarized parliament.

Open or Closed? How List Type Affects Electoral Performance, Candidate Selection, and Campaign Effort

What effect does using open (as opposed to closed) lists in proportional representation elections have on party performance and the quality of candidate selection? We provide novel evidence by studying local elections in Colombia, where parties have discretion to field either open or closed lists. Using panel data covering the 1,100 Colombian municipalities for the 2003–2015 period, we leverage within-party, within-municipality, and over-time variation to identify the effect of ballot structure. We find that the adoption of open list dramatically increases parties’ vote and seat shares. Semi-structured interviews with a representative sample of candidates reveal that parties that use closed list struggle to attract high-quality candidates and to incentivize them to campaign. Consistent with these mechanisms, our statistical analyses confirm that open-list candidates are more experienced, more engaged in their constituencies and campaigns, and less likely to have committed election fraud in the past.

Winners and Losers of the Ballot: Electronic vs. Traditional Paper Voting Systems in Brazil

AbstractScholars concur that free and fair elections are essential for proper democratic functioning, but our understanding of the political effects of democratic voting systems is incomplete. This article mitigates the gap by exploiting the gradual transformation of voting systems and ballot structures in Brazil’s 1998 executive elections to study the relationship between voting systems and viable and nonviable candidates’ vote shares, using regression discontinuity design. It finds that the introduction of electronic voting concentrated vote shares among viable candidates and thus exhibited electoral bias. We posit that this result occurred because viable candidates were better able to communicate the information that electronic voters needed to cast valid ballots than were their nonviable counterparts. The article uses survey data to demonstrate that electronic voters responded to changes in ballot design and internalized the information viable candidates made available to them.

Back from Holyrood: How mixed-member proportional representation and ballot structure shape the personal vote

Research on mixed-member legislatures demonstrates that members face different incentive structures when cultivating a personal vote. In this article, we examine how Scotland’s adoption of a mixed-member proportional system (MMP) and a change in ballot structure affect the legislative activities undertaken and emphasised by Members of Scottish Parliament (MSPs). Utilising a range of measures of legislative behaviour, we find that MSPs representing constituencies spend less time legislating and more time engaged in constituent service work. Regional members, conversely, lodge more parliamentary motions when not listed on the ballot and sponsor more members’ bills than constituency-based colleagues when on the ballot. We conclude that electoral structures directly affect the representational styles MSPs adopt, while calling for conceptual reconsideration of the personal vote.

The Impact of Intraparty Electoral Reforms on Party System Nationalization

Abundant research demonstrates that electoral rules have an impact on party system fragmentation. Building on these findings, and adopting a dynamic approach, this article investigates the effect of changes of the ballot structure on party system nationalization and shows that this effect is conditioned by levels of ethno-geographic concentration and political decentralization. Specifically, candidate-centered reforms hamper party system nationalization by making parties less likely to obtain similar vote shares across constituencies, whereas party-centered reforms tend to foster it. Moreover, concentration of ethnic groups at the district level or considerable political decentralization exacerbates the impact of candidate-centered changes. These effects are demonstrated through an analysis of an original dataset of electoral reforms and party system nationalization as measured with different indices across fifty-nine democracies and more than five hundred legislative elections.

Forced to vote, but not for women. The effect of compulsory voting on voting for women

Compulsory voting is an underexposed factor of the electoral system that possibly influences women’s descriptive representation. Studlar and McAllister (Eur J Polit Res 41(2):233–253, 2002) found a negative effect, but no theoretical explanations were given. We develop two possible explanations: voters who only vote because they have to are less politically sophisticated, and therefore vote less sophisticatedly, and/or they have different attitudes about women in political life. From our study, we are able to detect a gendered effect of compulsory voting in Belgium’s flexible-list PR system, but only the vote sophistication explanation is confirmed. Voters who would no longer vote without compulsory voting significantly vote more for top candidates (mostly men) and give significantly less preference votes for candidates lower down the list. This points us to the complexity of the ballot structure as an important new dimension that could help explain gendered voting effects of compulsory voting systems. Finally, since different effects for formal and descriptive representation appear, we posit that compulsory voting constitutes a dilemma for women activists.

Ballot structure, list flexibility and policy representation

ABSTRACTThere is a growing body of research on the impact of the electoral system ‘ballot structure’ on the behaviour of politicians. We offer a clear, ordinal and rules-based three-way coding (closed, flexible, open) of the electoral systems used in European Parliament elections, taking into account both the ballot type and the intra-party seat-allocation rules. For the notoriously difficult group of flexible list-systems, we show how these operated in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 elections, and introduce an additional behavioural distinction between ‘weakly flexible’ and ‘strongly flexible’ subtypes at the party-list-level. We then illustrate how the type of ballot used in an election can influence individual policy representation by looking at the vote-splits between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the European People’s Party in a vote on tackling homophobia.

Endogenous ballot structures: The selection of open and closed lists in Colombia’s legislative elections

What are the incentives for parties to personalize electoral competition? This paper proposes that both open and closed lists give congruity, rather than tension, to the interests of party leaders and candidates. However, the efficacy of each list type depends on the electoral returns expected from promoting the partisan and personal vote. To test this argument, we analyze the choices of parties over the ballot structure by leveraging an unusual institutional feature of the Colombian legislative elections, wherein parties are allowed to present either an open or a closed list, varying their choices across electoral districts and contests. Our empirical analysis shows that parties are more likely to open their lists in high-magnitude districts and wherever they have a strong, local electoral organization. We also find a positive relationship between the selection of closed lists among personalist parties, providing evidence to previous arguments proposing a closed list as a tool to concentrate campaign efforts behind a particular candidate.

Assessing Ballot Structure and Split Ticket Voting: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment

Although a growing number of countries have implemented electronic voting, few scholars have considered the unintended consequences of such reforms. We argue that changes in ballot structure imposed by electronic voting, implemented under the exact same electoral rules, can facilitate ballot splitting. Exploiting data from three elections and a novel ballot reform in Salta, Argentina—electronic voting was incrementally introduced over multiple elections—we provide an empirical analysis of how ballot structure influences ballot splitting. We use the Geographic Information System to reconstruct precinct demographics and matching to address threats to random assignment. This empirical strategy allows us to treat our data as a quasi-experiment. We find that precincts casting electronic ballots under an Australian ballot, rather than the ballot-and-envelope system, have significantly higher rates of ballot splitting. Our findings imply that less complicated voting procedures can affect the composition of legis...

Electoral rules, corruption, inequality and evaluations of democracy

AbstractFeatures of electoral systems have been found to have positive effects on evaluations of democracy. This article proposes that there are larger social forces that must be accounted for in such analyses. Using European Social Survey measures of democratic expectations and the ‘satisfaction with democracy’ item, this study tests for effects of electoral rules on perceptions of democracy. It is found that multipartyism/proportionality and preferential ballot structure appear to correspond with positive evaluations of elections and parties, and with greater satisfaction with how democracy is functioning. However, these relationships dissipate when corruption and income inequality are accounted for. This suggests substantial limits to the capacity of electoral reforms to enhance democratic legitimacy. It also suggests that studies of mass perceptions of democratic performance may over‐estimate effects of electoral rules if country‐level corruption and income inequality are not accounted for.

Empowering Representative Voters: A Rationale and a Model for the Practice of Weighting Votes

In practice, votes cast in parliamentary and related elections receive more weight as they are more representative. That practice is difficult to rationalize either from a juridical constitutional-democratic, or an economist preferential-choice point of view. On an applied-psychometric basis, the author presents a rationale by which voters are conceived as evaluators of political parties’ programs, candidates, and past performance. That conception leads to a general weighting model, of which both strict proportionality (unit weighting) and strict plurality (dichotomous weighting) appear to be special cases. The model appears to develop its full potential in a combination with an otherwise impractical dual ballot structure, by which voters can indicate a desired coalition partner, as illustrated by a fictive example. Reservations with respect to the model and its rationale are discussed.

Policy leadership and re-election in the European Parliament

ABSTRACTWhat determines the re-election of incumbent members of the European Parliament (MEPs)? Using Heckman probit models with sample selection to predict re-election in 2014, this contribution considers the impact of policy leadership, formal leadership, professional dedication, and seniority, and investigates the conditional effect of ballot structures. It finds that formal leadership only has a positive effect for party leaders elected from open lists, while dedication and seniority do not impact incumbents’ electoral performance. Instead, policy leadership is most clearly associated with incumbents’ electoral fortunes, including an innovative new measure of MEPs’ ability to influence the votes of others. The results also suggest that party leaders, when creating electoral lists that are not subject to change by voters, seek to ensure that policy leaders are reelected, but that voters, when given the opportunity to change the rankings of candidates on electoral lists, favor MEPs with greater electoral visibility instead.