The Runner-Up Effect

Anagol, Santosh; Fujiwara, Thomas

doi:10.3386/w20261

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…At a general level, this finding is reminiscent of a recent branch of voting theory, in which votes can have a downstream signaling effect on policy (Meirowitz and Shotts 2009; Piketty 2000; Razin 2003). It is also in line with the empirical findings of Anagol and Fujiwara (2014) that finishing second instead of third in plurality elections affects a candidate's future political success.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

“…Interestingly, this accords well with our reasoning that the key mechanism generating the primary effect is found at the party level (in promotion decisions) rather than at the candidate level (for example, via higher career ambitions and efforts). Furthermore, it testifies to the fact that party allegiances are quite weak in the Brazilian municipalities, where party switching is commonplace (Anagol and Fujiwara 2014). For example, a candidate who fails to gain the nomination in his or her own party can simply switch to another party.…”

Section: Background Data and Results For Brazilmentioning

confidence: 87%

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The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

Folke

Persson

Rickne³

2016

Am Polit Sci Rev

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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.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Section: Background Data and Results For Brazilmentioning

confidence: 87%

The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

Folke

Persson

Rickne³

2016

Am Polit Sci Rev

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“…Additionally, by focusing on parties that almost tied in votes, our results indicate that agents respond to rankings that provide no additional information conditional on the publicly available variable that fully determines the ranking (votes). This adds to evidence of rank-based decision-making in politics (Anagol and Fujiwara 2016;Folke, Persson, and Rickne 2016;Meriläinen and Tukiainen 2018;Pons and Tricaud 2018) and is consistent with models where agents make choices over-weighting salient attributes (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer 2013). Our results thus speak to how narrow victories are interpreted (or marketed) by some as "the will of the people."…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Rank Effects in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation

Fujiwara

Sanz

2019

The Review of Economic Studies

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Theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties’ seat shares determine their bargaining power. We present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction, but consistent with a norm prescribing that “the most voted party should form the government”. We first present case studies from several countries and regression discontinuity design-based evidence from twenty-eight national European parliaments. We then focus on 2,898 Spanish municipal elections in which two parties tie in the number of seats. We find that the party with slightly more general election votes is substantially more likely to appoint the mayor. Since tied parties should (on average) have equal bargaining power, this identifies the effect of being labeled the most voted. This effect is comparable to that of obtaining an additional seat, and is also present when a right-wing party is the most voted and the second and third most voted parties are allied left-wing parties who can form a combined majority. A model where elections both aggregate information and discipline incumbents can rationalize our results and yields additional predictions we take to the data, such as voters punishing second most voted parties that appoint mayors.

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“…Consistent with Myatt 's ( ) prediction that the amount of strategic voting increases with the level of information, Hall and Snyder () found that higher levels of information in U.S. primary elections decrease the number of votes and donations “wasted” on candidates unlikely to win. An important piece of information used by voters to coordinate comes from candidates' rankings in previous elections: second‐place candidates are substantially more likely than close third‐place candidates to run in, and win, a subsequent election ( Anagol and Fujiwara ()).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence From Runoffs With Two or Three Candidates

Pons¹,

Tricaud

2018

Econometrica

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In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD around this threshold, we find that the third candidate's presence substantially increases the share of registered citizens who vote for any candidate and reduces the vote share of the top two candidates. It disproportionately harms the candidate ideologically closest to the third and causes her defeat in one fifth of the races. Additional evidence suggests that these results are driven by voters who value voting expressively over voting strategically for the top‐two candidate they dislike the least to ensure her victory; and by third candidates who, absent party‐level agreements leading to their dropping out, value the benefits associated with competing in the second round more than influencing its outcome.

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The Runner-Up Effect

Cited by 9 publications

References 50 publications

The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

The Primary Effect: Preference Votes and Political Promotions

Rank Effects in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation

Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence From Runoffs With Two or Three Candidates

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