Informing Consent: Voter Ignorance, Political Parties, and Election Law

Informing Electorates via Election Law: An Experimental Study of Partisan Endorsements and Nonpartisan Voter Guides in Local Elections

“…Do you prefer Mar over Lee or Lee over Mar? '' 14 This treatment was motivated by research showing that endorsements help citizens make informed decisions (Lupia 1994;Lupia and McCubbins 1998;Boudreau 2009a) and, in particular, by Elmendorf and Schleicher's (2013) proposal to label candidates for down-ticket local offices with mayoral endorsements on ballots. 15 (The mayor did not make an endorsement in the Mar-Lee race, but these two public officials of similar stature did.…”

“…As such, we pool these two groups of respondents here. 15 Elmendorf and Schleicher (2013) argue that voters are more aware of the policy views of mayors on local issues than they are about most candidates for other city offices. They suggest that voters can use mayoral endorsements to infer these candidates' policy positions.…”

“…1992]). Legal scholars have further suggested that the ballot itself include candidate statements (Garrett 1999), or convey endorsements that prominent public officials make in initiative campaigns McCubbins 2013a, 2013b) and races for relatively obscure local offices (Elmendorf and Schleicher 2013).…”

“…For example, our political party endorsement treatment illustrates the effects that a ballot or ballot pamphlet that notes which candidates the Democratic and Republican parties endorsed might have on voters' choices in nonpartisan elections like the one we examine here. Our treatment that provides endorsements from prominent public officials examines Elmendorf and Schleicher's (2013) proposal to allow mayors to make on-ballot endorsements of candidates in nonpartisan local elections. Finally, our nonpartisan voter guide describing candidates' policy positions, while unlikely to inform ballot design, could easily be included in a ballot pamphlet to supplement the statements that candidates themselves are allowed to make.…”

The Partisan Ordering of Candidacies and the Pluralism of the Law of Democracy: The Case of Taiwan

“…It is quite another thing to explore the normative implications of, and responses to, this state of affairs. Along the great fault line between the public and the private, much has been debated about what the state (and especially the courts) should do with political parties in general and with their candidate selection in particular (see, e.g., Lowenstein 1993;Persily and Cain 2000;Issacharoff 2001;Persily 2001aPersily , 2001bCain 2001;Garrett 2002;Kang 2005Kang , 2011Pildes 2011b;Orr 2001Orr , 2011aOrr , 2011bElmendorf and Schleicher 2013;Dawood 2013). Notwithstanding the heated exchanges on questions such as whether a political party resembles more a private club or a public utility, at the heart of this grand debate is not the essentialist dispute over the nature of political parties.…”