Split-Ticket Voting in an STV System: Choice in a Non-Strategic Context

Abstract

This article explores the sources of weak party-voting patterns in Irish elections, conceptualising this as split-ticket voting. Ireland provides a context where election results show split-ticket voting is common, but the strategic interpretations of such behaviour that have been very prominent elsewhere are not generally applicable. We employ data from the Irish national election studies to explore the behaviour of individuals embedded in a variety of contexts. The results demonstrate the prevalence of split-ticket voting, and they support the validity of non-strategic explanations. One source of explanation for the patterns we find lies in differences between individuals: partisanship and the extent to which voters are attracted to candidates rather than parties are important. A second source is contextual: the factors connected with the complexity of the choice facing voters have a powerful influence on split-ticket voting.

Keywords:

• partisanship
• split-ticket voting
• strategic voting
• candidates
• Ireland

Notes

1 For instance, in Switzerland electors vote for a list which can be a party's list, or one amended by a voter to combine candidates from different lists.

2 Some states in the USA have an option (sometimes known as a master lever) to choose all the candidates of one political party with a single motion. By our definitions, a master lever vote would represent an instance of straight voting.

3 In some STV systems, such as Malta, the ballot paper is organised by party, but in Ireland there is a single list of candidates, arranged in alphabetic order. Party labels are indicated on the ballot. Arguably the Maltese structure increases the incidence of straight-ticket voting while the Irish one reduces it (Darcy and Marsh, 1994).

4 Most of the previous work on these patterns of voting in the Irish case has used a different terminology. Gallagher (1978) uses the term ‘solidarity’ to describe transfers within the same party, while Sinnott (1995) uses the term ‘party loyalty’. We prefer to use the terms split- and straight-ticket voting so as to fit the Irish case into more general patterns.

5 Explanations for straight- and split-ticket voting are generally the same ones, with only differences in the direction of the effects.

6 Given that we reject the idea of strategic voting on grounds of plausibility, our regression models do not include strategic voting variables. However, we looked at the effect of some common strategic voting variables such as previous year candidate's share of vote and spending by parties and candidates which turned out to be statistically insignificant across all models. Additional results are available from the authors upon request.

7 We also looked at non-singular leader rating of the sort presented for parties and candidates. However, we decided not to include this variable in subsequent models because it was highly correlated with party rating and statistically non-significant in any model.

8 The items are not the same in all three surveys although they are similar in substance. Mokken scaling analysis demonstrates that each provides scales with strong unidimensional properties, but of course they may not measure the same thing or do so with equal effectiveness. However, as we see in the analysis, the relationships we find are very similar in each of the three election studies.

9 To some degree this will be linked with the length of the ballot. We consider also the simple count of the number of candidates running in each constituency (ballot length) and a measure of the difficulty of finding a party's candidate on the ballot paper (position range). These two variables, however, were much less powerful than the simple count of the number of candidates run by each party.

10 At the suggestion of one reviewer we also ran a further random effects model allowing random effects at the candidate level. Results did not differ significantly from those in Table 4.