The Motivational Basis of Straight and Split Ticket Voting

Abstract

The extraordinary discrepancy in the popular vote for President Eisenhower and the vote for Republican Congressmen in the 1956 election dramatized a privilege which the American electorate exercises almost uniquely in the democratic world, the right of voters to split their ballots between the candidates of opposing political parties.The fact of ballot splitting in American elections is of course a commonplace but it has not been widely studied and it is not well understood. The aggregative statistics from the 1956 election make it apparent that millions of voters must have chosen President Eisenhower and a Democratic congressman but they do not tell us how many voters split their ballots in the opposite direction or how many voted for president but not for Congressman, and they give us only the vaguest indications of what was in the voters' minds when they crossed party lines in marking their ballots.

Exploiting Friends-and-Neighbors to Estimate Coattail Effects

“…Ballot features may also encourage voters to cast straight-ticket ballots and support the party of their preferred top-ballot candidate in down-ballot elections. Campbell and Miller (1957) contend that the straight-party option, which allows voters to cast a ballot for a party's candidate in every concurrent election with a single vote, may increase the prevalence of straight-ticket voting.…”

“…However, columns 10 and 11 of Table 3 shows no significant difference in the magnitude of gubernatorial coattails in states that elect their governor concurrently with the president. States also vary in whether they give voters the option to cast a straight-party ballot, a feature which may magnify the coattail effect by making it easier for voters to select down-ballot candidates of the same party (Campbell and Miller, 1957).…”

‘Less at Stake’ or a Different Game? Regional Elections in Catalonia and Scotland

“…Jacobson (1991) argues that voters' decisions in the presidential and congressional arenas are independent; that is to say, the reasons for voters to split their ticket would reside in differences in the political programmes, priorities and performances of the parties in each electoral arena. The fact that split-ticket voters tend to have a weaker sense of party identification than straight-ticket voters (Campbell and Miller, 1957;Beck et al, 1992) would help them to focus on factors such as government performance and candidate images in their voting decisions.…”

Are Danes More Inclined to Ticket Splitting than the Swedes and the English?1

“…Consequently, voters had to decide whether they should 'split' their votes and vote for different party labels at the general and the local elections or they should cast a 'straight' vote (Campbell & Miller 1957), supporting the same party when marking their national and local ballots.…”