No abstract

Studies suggest that between one-fourth and one-third of localities elect their leaders on partisan ballots. Does the presence of a party label on the ballot affect the level of partisanship in local office? I leverage the fact that within select states, school boards vary as to whether their members are elected on partisan or nonpartisan ballots. Do the differences in policy preferences between Democrats and Republicans differ across these ballot contexts? Does a party cue treatment, where respondents are reminded of the general policy positions of both parties, differentially affect elected officials in different ballot contexts? Evidence from the survey reveals a group of “polarized nonpartisans” who tend to express more partisan views about public policy than their co-partisans elected in an explicitly partisan system. At the same time, providing party cues in policy debates disproportionately moves those elected on partisan ballots as opposed to nonpartisan ones. That partisan-elected officials are more influenced by party cues appears to validate the motivations of nonpartisan reformers, yet the “polarized nonpartisans” found in the control group should give those reformers pause and reveals the need for continued research into the behavioral consequences of nonpartisan ballots.

Because of the particular candidates who ran, the 2016 presidential campaign was defined by gender to a remarkable degree. This led many observers to expect a historically large gender gap in voting. In contrast to these expectations, the gender gap between men and women’s votes in 2016 was only slightly larger than in other recent elections. We argue that an immense gender divide did not emerge because it was constrained by high levels of partisanship in the electorate, especially “negative partisanship” toward the opposing party that leaves little room for gender to matter. In addition, we challenge two common assumptions: that the gender gap helps Democratic candidates and that women were more persuadable than men over the course of the campaign. Both men and women vacillated in their views of Clinton’s honesty during the campaign, with men shifting away from her and toward Trump just before election day.

There is a long history of political science research focused on congressional candidates riding presidential coattails into office. The underlying theory for this potential relationship is relatively simple—when presidential nominees are popular, they can help bolster the electoral fortunes of their down-ballot, co-partisan candidates. If this is right, congressional candidates should be incentivized to publicly align themselves with their co-partisan presidential nominee, albeit in strategic ways. We look for this relationship by constructing an original dataset of congressional candidate Twitter data and identifying the extent to which candidates mention presidential nominees during the 2020 campaign, a behavior we call “tweeting on coattails.” Our data allow us to describe relationships between “tweeting on coattails”, candidate party ID, and district-level electoral conditions. We find that overall, challengers tweeted more than incumbents, but incumbents were more likely to “tweet on coattails.” In addition, candidates of both parties “tweeted on coattails” more frequently if they were running in a district where their party’s nominee is popular. This relationship was not symmetric in magnitude, however, as Republicans were significantly more likely to tweet about Donald Trump than Democrats were to tweet about Joe Biden.

To what extent does the public prefer local government officials to be selected via nonpartisan, as opposed to partisan, elections? Do preferences vary across different types of local offices? Do Democrats and Republicans systematically differ in their preference for nonpartisan versus partisan local elections? Using a novel dataset based on the 2018 and 2020 CES, I find that while nonpartisan elections are the modal preference for local offices, the proportion of voters favoring this model varies with office-type, party ID, and whether respondents live in counties with a majority of their co-partisans. Specifically, Democrats are more likely to prefer nonpartisan elections for local offices than are Republicans, but there is only evidence for these inter-party differences in Republican-leaning counties. County partisanship also has a significant effect on intra-party variation in preference for nonpartisan elections to certain local offices.