The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

Abstract

In this analysis of how electoral rules and outcomes shape the internal organization of political parties, we make an analogy to primary elections to argue that parties use preference-vote tallies to identify popular politicians and promote them to positions of power. We document this behavior among parties in Sweden's semi-open-list system and in Brazil's open-list system. To identify a causal impact of preference votes, we exploit a regression discontinuity design around the threshold of winning the most preference votes on a party list. In our main case, Sweden, these narrow “primary winners” are at least 50% more likely to become local party leaders than their runners-up. Across individual politicians, the primary effect is present only for politicians who hold the first few positions on the list and when the preference-vote winner and runner-up have similar competence levels. Across party groups, the primary effect is the strongest in unthreatened governing parties.

Cue-Taking, Satisficing, or Both? Quasi-experimental Evidence for Ballot Position Effects

“…With pure rank-taking, parties' and voters' preferences regarding candidates would have to be alike for cue-taking to result in acceptable choices. There is some empirical evidence that this is the case, since parties in flexible list systems promote candidates who proved popular with voters in the past (more so than expected on the basis of list position) to more promising list ranks in subsequent elections (André et al 2015;Crisp et al 2013;Folke et al 2015). 36 Preferences of voters and parties need not coincide in all contexts, though.…”

Gender Quotas and the Crisis of the Mediocre Man: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

“…However, we do not believe that this is the case given the strong norm in Swedish national parties to honor the autonomy of their local parties. Recent work by Folke, Persson, and Rickne (2016) reinforces that view by citing documents from national party congress meetings.…”

“…These estimates strongly indicate 18 As shown in online Appendix Table W1, when we use a continuous measure of competence, the baseline estimates in Table 4 and Figure 4 have the same signs as with the binary measure, although they are noisier and somewhat smaller in absolute value. 19 As further discussed in Folke, Persson, and Rickne (2016), data from a large mandatory survey of all post-election appointments made by local parties in the 2006 and 2010 elections show that the top-ranked politician on the largest majority party's ballot was appointed to the position of chairperson of the municipal council board (the equivalent of mayor) in nine out of ten cases. that our competence measure predicts direct voter support, in line with our model's core assumption.…”

“…When political success is the preference-vote share or reelection, we can compare specifications with and without fixed effects for list rank, ϕ i, t . This control is particularly important for preference votes, as voters may cast such votes for top-ranked candidates by default (Montabes Pereira and Ortega Villodres 2002;Folke, Persson, and Rickne 2016), which could conflate our estimate of β due to the fact that income residuals are positively correlated with list rank. The results from running equation (4) appear in the first six columns of Table 1.…”

Commitment or expertise? Technocratic appointments as political responses to economic crises

“…In open lists, not only nomination and election but also promotions to executive appointments depend on voter choice. Specifically, recent research finds that in open list systems, preference votes provide information on the popularity of party candidates and this doubles the probability of political appointments (Folke et al 2016). This direct relationship between preference votes and political appointments in open list systems provides strong incentives to politicians to be at least as concerned about serving their voters as the party leadership.…”