Elsevier

Electoral Studies

Volume 42, June 2016, Pages 157-163
Electoral Studies

Campaign civility under preferential and plurality voting

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2016.02.009Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Innovative research design compares campaigns under two electoral systems.

  • Original data measuring voter perceptions of campaign tone.

  • Campaigns are seen as less negative in places using preferential voting.

  • Voters in places using preferential voting twice as likely to report campaigns were “a lot less negative”.

  • Results are consistent across a series of robustness checks.

Abstract

We present reasons to expect that campaigns are less negative under preferential voting. We then examine if preferential voting systems affect how people perceive the conduct of elections. This paper reports results from surveys designed to measure voters‘ perceptions of candidates’ campaigns, comparing places with plurality elections to those that used preferential voting rules. Our surveys of voters indicate that people in cities using preferential voting were significantly more satisfied with the conduct of local campaigns than people in similar cities with plurality elections. People in cities with preferential voting were also less likely to view campaigns as negative, and less likely to respond that candidates were frequently criticizing each other. Results are consistent across a series of robustness checks.

Section snippets

Campaigns under preferential versus plurality voting

Most local elections in the US are conducted with plurality voting. However, in the past decade a number of US cities adopted the Alternative Vote, a form of preferential voting that is commonly referred to as Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in the United States. Both election systems are used to elect a single candidate to a single office (e.g. a single-member districted city council position, a single city-wide city council position, the office of mayor, etc.). In standard plurality elections a

Perceptions of campaigns across different electoral systems: a comparative method

Our study takes advantage of natural variation in election rules at the local level in the US by conducting surveys that measured voter perceptions of campaign negativity. We identified multiple control cases (plurality cities) that were approximate demographic matches of cities using preferential voting in order to provide comparative leverage for assessing potential effects of the different electoral systems. This process was constrained somewhat by the limited number of jurisdictions with

Data and methods: measures of perceptions of campaign civility

We test if campaigns conducted under preferential voting may have been perceived as being less negative than those conducted under plurality rules. Given the potentially limited (Bowler and Donovan, 2013; but see Anderson and Guillory, 1997), perverse (Berinsky, 2005) and unanticipated effects (Burden et al., 2014) that electoral institutions can have on political attitudes and behavior, we might expect that mass perceptions about negativity in campaigns would be unrelated to the local

Results: multivariate tests of election systems on perceptions of civility

We use multivariate models to test for a relationship between election system and perceptions of campaign tone. Our expectation is that after controlling for key city-level demographic variables, a dichotomous term representing residence in a city using preferential voting will have a positive relationship with perceptions that campaigns were less negative than in the past. The preferential voting variable is also expected have a positive association with satisfaction with how campaigns were

Robustness checks for control cases using jack-knifed samples and matching methods

Given that the quality of the matched jurisdictions is important for establishing confidence in these results, we conducted four separate robustness tests to determine whether our control plurality cities are a good match for our treatment cases (preferential voting cities). First, control cities were selected based on demographic traits listed in the Appendix. All cities where voters were surveyed used non-partisan elections, so we did not have local results that revealed city-level

Conclusion

Campaigns conducted under preferential electoral systems such as the Alternative Vote (known as Ranked Choice Voting in the US) may have less conflict among political rivals. We have tested that intuition here and found some support for it. Our results are based on comparisons of campaigns held under plurality and preferential voting in just one election cycle in the US (2013), and are based on the only three preferential voting cities that had competitive elections that year.

There is, then, a

Acknowledgment

This research was supported, in part, with a grant from the Democracy Fund.

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