Abstract
We investigate the effect of ballot order on the outcomes of California city council and school board elections. Candidates listed first win office between four and five percentage points more often than expected absent order effects. This first candidate advantage is larger in races with more candidates and for higher quality candidates. The first candidate advantage is similar across contexts: the magnitude of the effect is not statistically distinguishable in city council and in school board elections, in races with and without an open seat, and in races consolidated and not consolidated with statewide general elections. Standard satisficing models cannot fully explain ballot order effects in our dataset of multi-winner elections.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 175-197 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Political Behavior |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2013 |
Funding
Acknowledgments We thank Jon Bendor, Jonah Berger, Michael Hanmer, Daniel Kessler, Peter Reiss, and seminar participants at MIT, Stanford, and the 2008 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting for comments and suggestions. We also thank Seth Hill for providing us with the individual-level ballot data. Salant acknowledges the financial support of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Leonard W. and Shirley R. Ely Fellowship. Replication data is available at http:// www.sas.upenn.edu/*marcmere/replicationdata/BallotOrderReplicationData.zip.
Keywords
- Ballot order effects
- City council
- Satisificing
- School boards
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science