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The grass is not greener on the other side: the role of attention in voting behavior

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Abstract

A lack of information about electoral candidates leads to a ballot order effect that increases the chances of candidates in the top electoral list positions winning voters’ support. The ballot order effect is confounded by the effect of ranking and the effect of attention, which work in the same direction. We exploit a variation in ballot layout (the quasi-random location of the break between the first and second sides of the ballot) in the 2006, 2010, 2013, and 2017 Czech parliamentary open list proportional representation elections to disentangle these effects and identify the effect of attention. We show that being listed on the reverse side of the ballot paper decreases electoral support—measured by number of preferential votes received—by at least 40%. Focusing on preferential votes allows us to filter out the effect of political party preference.

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Availability of code, data and materials

A replication package (including code and data) is available at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7218947, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.7218947.

Notes

  1. The constituencies (regions) and the maximum number of candidates set by law for each are: Prague (36), Moravian-Silesian (36), Central Bohemian (34), South Moravian (34), Ústí nad Labem (26), Olomouc (23), South Bohemian (22), Zlín (22), Plzeň (20), Hradec Králové (20), Vysočina (20), Pardubice (19), Liberec (17), and Karlovy Vary (14).

  2. These rules for allocating preferential votes have been in place since 2010. In previous elections, voters could only cast 2 preferential votes and the threshold for re-ranking was 7%. Our empirical specification (1) presented in Sect. 3 accounts for this change of rules.

  3. Figure 1 also shows extreme cases when there were only few candidates on the front side of the ballot. These come from a party that included its manifesto within its name (see Appendix Fig. 5). This party was never elected to Parliament.

  4. For details on variables description and data sources see Sect. 4.

  5. The electoral database is publicly available at https://volby.cz/opendata/opendata.htm.

  6. For an example of a ballot see annotated Fig. 4 in the Appendix.

  7. This database is not available any more due to GDPR. We use the version that was released in 2015.

  8. Over 91% of respondents who filled out their nationality in the 2011 Census self-assigned to Czech nationality or to nationalities related to the Czech lands (these nationalities do not differ in culture and language from the majority).

  9. Coefficients \(\gamma\) obtained using the PPML are transformed into semi-elasticities using formula \(100\times (e^\gamma -1)\)%.

  10. We exclude page breaks within the first nine positions on the ballot list as these are related to one rather obscure political party.

  11. For the empirical cumulative distribution function see Fig. 7 in the Appendix.

  12. When evaluating a list of candidates, people tend to look for reasons to vote for a candidate rather than reasons not to give them a vote (Koriat et al., 1980; Miller & Krosnick, 1998).

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Acknowledgements

Financial support via a joint grant from the Czech Science Foundation and the Austrian Science Fund (GF20-18033L) is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Michal Ševčík, Onřej Zlatníček, and Dagmar Gallisová for their excellent research assistance.

Funding

Financial support via a joint grant from the Czech Science Foundation and the Austrian Science Fund (GF20-18033L) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Masaryk University, Lipová 41a, 60200, Brno, Czech Republic

    Lucie Coufalová & Štěpán Mikula

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  1. Lucie Coufalová
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  2. Štěpán Mikula
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study’s conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Štěpán Mikula. The first draft and the revised version of the manuscript were written by Lucie Coufalová and Štěpán Mikula and both authors commented on working versions of the manuscript and read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Štěpán Mikula.

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Appendix 1: Additional tables and figures

Appendix 1: Additional tables and figures

See Figs(4, 5, 6 and 7) and Tables (4, 5, 6 and 7)

Fig. 4
figure 4

Example of a ballot from 2010 parliamentary elections. Note: 1 – constituency; 2 – party number (identical in across constituencies); 3 – party name; 4 – candidate’s position on the ballot (ranking); 5 – candidate’s name; 6 – age; 7 – occupation; 8 – municipality of residence; 9 – affiliation with a political party

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Fig. 5
figure 5

Example of a ballot with an extreme layout

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Fig. 6
figure 6

Number of unique last rows. Note: Sample contains only double-sided ballots from the 2006, 2010, 2013, 2017 parliamentary elections with at least one candidate listed on each side of the ballot

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Fig. 7
figure 7

Empirical cumulative distribution of placebo estimates. Note: Figure depicts the empirical cumulative distribution function of placebo estimates of the coefficients of interest. In the placebo test we repeatedly (1,000 times) randomly assign observed page break locations to single-sided ballots and re-estimate (1) in full specification

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Table 4 Robustness check: Exclusion of observations with no variance in the position of the last row on the front side in party–election pairs
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Table 5 Robustness check: Exclusion of observations with no variance in the position of the last row on the front side in constituency–election pairs
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Table 6 Robustness check: Exclusion of observations with the position of the last row on the front side < 10
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Table 7 Robustness check: Exclusion of observations with the position of the last row on the front side < 23
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Coufalová, L., Mikula, Š. The grass is not greener on the other side: the role of attention in voting behavior. Public Choice 194, 205–223 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-022-01030-z

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