Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ballot Structure and Voting Decisions

William Marsh Rice University, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

General Summary This project focuses on the role played by ballot design and vote casting procedures in shaping the decisions made by voters in the polling booth and, therein, electoral outcomes. The PI argues that the different modes through which electoral alternatives are presented to voters are critical to understanding how people vote, and the extent to which certain candidates or parties are disproportionately advantaged or disadvantaged by different types of ballots. The countries selected for this project (Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador and Honduras) offer the opportunity to measure a variety of outcomes affecting representation as a result of variations in the ballot structure. Such variations in presenting the electoral offering may benefit certain parties, offset the probability of women being elected, and/or affect whether candidates' personal attributes observed in the picture of them included on the official ballot affect the probability of being elected. Studying the consequences of ballots and their features on electoral outcomes can help to explain how and who people vote for, shedding light on different aspects of representation, such as minority groups' access to legislative seats and the effectiveness and relevance of informational cues provided by the ballot. The results of this project will provide policymakers and citizens considering or engaged in ballot design reform with invaluable information regarding the potential impact of reforms on representation and accountability in particular and the quality of electoral democracy in a given political system more generally. Technical Summary This project contributes to a deeper understanding of the electoral process by addressing the role of ballot design and vote casting procedures on representation. Two different analytic strategies are applied to evaluate how the way the electoral offering is presented to the voter affects voter behavior and electoral outcomes. First, the project uses observational data to assess whether different ballot designs lead to different electoral outcomes. Second, given that the causal mechanism operates at an individual level, and that voter behavior can be influenced by a myriad of factors, an experimental research design is used to assess how voters may judge candidates' traits in actual elections. For the first strategy, the PI uses data from Argentina provinces that have replaced the traditional partisan paper ballot with different versions of the Australian ballot. She analyzes how different presentations of the electoral offering benefit certain parties using a quasi-experimental research design. Using Chilean municipal data from 1992 to 2008, the PI examines the probabilities of candidates from underrepresented groups being elected given their order placement on the ballot in open list multi-member proportional representation systems. For the second strategy, she conducts experiments in three open list system countries (El Salvador, Ecuador and Honduras) that employ panachage (where voters have the opportunity to distribute their multiple votes among candidates from different parties in multimember districts). The experiments assess whether candidates' personal attributes affect the probability of being elected and how contextual information provided in the voting booth alters voters' evaluation of and preference for candidates by supplying additional tools to decode informational cues.