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Abstract:Candidates listed first on the ballot paper regularly receive more votes than other candidates, but what role does ballot layout play in this connection? Experimental studies from first-pastthe-post systems show that the ballot position effect is causal as the order of names functions as a cue to voters. Does this also hold for PR systems where voters may vote for a party instead of a specific candidate? We identify a natural experiment in Danish local and regional elections involving more than 10,000 candidates on 103 different ballot papers using ballot layout to study ballot position effects. We find indeed, the ballot position/layout has a causal effect on election results in PR systems. Our findings indicate that the empirical domain of ballot position and layout effects is much wider than suggested by previous research. 2The question of whether a top position on the ballot paper affords a candidate an advantage over other candidates in an election has a long history, both in political science and in practical politics. Woodrow Wilson made the following observation in the beginning of the twentieth century, and it remains valid to this day:I have seen a ballot … which contained seven hundred names. It was bigger than the page of a newspaper and was printed in close columns as a newspaper would be. Of course no voter who is not a trained politician, who has not watched the whole process of nomination carefully, who does not know a great deal about the derivation and character and association of every nominee it contains, can vote a ticket like that with intelligence. In nine cases out of ten, as it has turned out, he will simply mark the first name under each office (Wilson 1912: 593).Since then, a considerable body of political science research has been devoted to identifying more exactly the effect of being listed first on the ballot. Many studies find positive effects, but many studies also find that the contingent effects suggested by Wilson -publicity, It is especially unfortunate that there is so little evidence from proportional representation (PR) systems, which is the most common type of electoral system worldwide (Reynolds et al. 2005: 31). We are primarily interested in list PR systems where voters may vote for a specific candidate or simply vote for a party and thus avoid the challenge of having to select a specific candidate. It is therefore far from clear that ballot position effects will be found in these systems. 4The purpose of this paper is to study list PR systems to determine the degree to which they belong to the empirical domain of ballot position effects. Danish local and regional elections offer a unique opportunity to do this. The paper is structured as follows: We begin by reviewing the existing empirical literature in order to evaluate the present knowledge of ballot position effects, to identify lacunae in the literature, and to argue for the value added by our study. Second, we introduce the Danish local and regional electoral system and its merits as a natural experimen...

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