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Ballot Position Effects Under Compulsory and Optional Preferential-List PR Electoral Systems

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Abstract

How do voters in preferential-list proportional representation (PLPR) systems make their candidate choices after selecting their party? We study this question in Poland and the Czech Republic, which use PLPR with different rules to elect the lower house of their national parliaments. In Poland, the system obligates voters to select one candidate from their preferred party, while in the Czech Republic voters have the option of casting up to four preference votes for candidates on the party list. Drawing on the ballot cues literature, we test for ballot position and rank effects in candidate preference vote shares. Further, we exploit the difference in voting rules to test whether ballot position effects are stronger in Poland where voters must cast a preference vote compared to the Czech Republic where preference voting is optional. We find that while being listed first or last has a disproportionately positive effect on preference vote shares compared to what would be expected based on ballot ranking in both countries, the ballot position and rank effects are much more powerful in Poland than the Czech Republic.

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Notes

  1. Ethnic minorities play a marginal role in Polish and Czech politics on the national level. According to the Polish National Census of 2011 over 91 % of respondents declared only a Polish ethnicity (http://stat.gov.pl/cps/rde/xbcr/gus/lu_nps2011_wyniki_nsp2011_22032012.pdf). In the Czech National Census of 2001, 90 % of respondents declared the Czech ethnicity (which increases to over 94 % when the regional group identifications of Moravians and Silesians are included) (http://www.czso.cz/sldb/sldb2001.nsf/tabx/CZ0000).

  2. The data on the overall number of votes cast for a party were retrieved from the website of the Czech Statistical Office http://www.volby.cz/pls/ps2010/ps2?xjazyk=EN. The rate of preference votes to overall votes cast for the 5 main parties are as follows: VV 56.69 %, KSCM 60.90 %, CSSD 69.52 %, TOP09 74.74 %, ODS 85.93 %.

  3. Our analysis shows that a total of 116 MPs who won seats in parliament passed the 5 % preference vote threshold. Some of these candidates were originally ranked in top positions that would have won them a seat. But a number of candidates who won seats through preference voting were originally ranked in low positions on the ballot. For example, 17 of these MPs had ballot positions between 10 and 36. One MP, Jan Florián, was listed last on the ODS Prague ballot (position 36) and won the seat with 5.14 % of preference votes.

  4. Bein and Hecock (1957, p. 11) mention an example of a Chicago ward committee member who failed to file his nomination for Congress first (before other candidates) during an era when the order of filing determined ballot position, and he then “waited until just before the deadline, in order to secure the last spot on the ballot.”

  5. As is often the case in studies that discuss parties and voting behavior, we opt to focus on the dominant parties in the political systems. These parties and their candidates were more widely known to voters than many of the minor parties competing in the elections, some of which did not run candidate slates in all regions, or ran very short lists of candidates. In the Czech Republic, 16 parties won less than 1 % of the overall vote. Further, 11 of the 27 parties did not run lists in all 14 districts. In a few cases, these small parties ran very few candidates on the district list.  For example, the Liberal Party (Liberálové) had just 3 candidates on their party list in the Central Bohemian district, fewer than the number of preference votes (4) that a voter could cast. In Poland, only 7 of the 11 parties contesting the elections ran lists in all districts. Five of the Polish parties included in our analysis attracted 95.89 % of the overall vote. Including these minor parties, that have candidates earning similar shares of preference votes as candidates from the winning parties (since preference vote share is computed from the number of preference votes for that party in the district), would likely dampen or erase the impact of “incumbency” or “previous campaign experience” in our analysis. Further, voters who vote for unviable parties are likely to be motivated by different factors in casting their party ballot and their preference vote than those who support one of the parties expected to win seats. A future study could compare whether preference voting is in fact different for the minor parties.

  6. This includes five nationwide parties and the German Minority which, from a legal standpoint, is not a political party.

  7. Specifically, this is the number of preference votes for a candidate divided by the total number of preference votes cast for this candidate’s party in the district.

  8. The percentage standardization was selected as opposed to the z-standardization due to the comparability between the first and the last position on the ballot (set at 0 and 100 respectively), which we expect to be particularly psychologically prominent. The z-standardization, on the other hand, sets mean values and simplifies interpretation of deviation from it. The focus on mean values in our analysis is unnecessary due to the lack of theoretical arguments for potential psychological prominence of central position on the party list.

  9. In the 2007 Sejm election just 21 % of candidates from winning parties were women. In that election women won 20 % of the seats.

  10. Demeaning (centering) variables reduces the correlation between age and age squared, which in turn solves the problem of collinearity between these terms in regression models using both of them. Whereas before centering the Pearson’s correlation coefficient between age and age squared amounts to 0.99, it falls to −0.06 after applying the transformation.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Steve Lem and Timothy Rich for their helpful comments and Michael Jankowski for his research support. We are indebted to the four anonymous referees who provided us with careful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Kamil Marcinkiewicz

  2. University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

    Mary Stegmaier

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  1. Kamil Marcinkiewicz
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Correspondence to Mary Stegmaier.

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Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2013 Northeastern Political Science Association conference, the 2014 Southern Political Science Association conference and the 2014 Midwest Political Science Association conference.

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Marcinkiewicz, K., Stegmaier, M. Ballot Position Effects Under Compulsory and Optional Preferential-List PR Electoral Systems. Polit Behav 37, 465–486 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-014-9294-0

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