Ballot Reform and the Decline of Third Parties in State Legislatures

Abstract

While it has been suggested that the original Australian ballot reforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may have had a detrimental effect on later third-party success in US elections, others have observed that many ballot laws ‘explain very little of the variance in either the number of minor party candidacies or the vote for them’. While there is much debate about the effects of these laws on electoral outcomes, a limitation of past research is an emphasis on statewide and federal elections, where many third-party candidacies are ‘agenda-setting’ rather than ‘office-seeking’ efforts. This research examines the effects of the original Australian ballot laws on state legislative elections, where office-seeking third-party candidates had a proven record of electoral success. The effects of initial reform adoption, straight ticket provisions, ballot form, prohibitions against ballot fusion, and the inclusion of write-in options on the ballot are tested in time-series Tobit models of the percentage of state house seats won by third-party candidates from 1870 to 1920. The results of the analysis suggest that the specific provisions included in these ballot laws had a statistically significant and substantial effect on later third-party success in state legislative elections.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, Sundquist (1983) observes that in 1886, Independent Labor parties did not have time to organise for contesting federal or statewide races, therefore they intentionally focused their efforts on local elections. Of these local contests, state legislative elections were particularly important for many third-party efforts. As Stedman and Stedman (1950) note, ‘the Granger and Populist parties had an advantage over their modern-day counterparts in their greater ability—actual as well as potential—to win control of state legislatures’ (43).

2. An additional measure of the number of third-party candidates elected to state house seats is also employed in a separate analysis (estimated as a time series Poisson count model). Those results are available from the author, upon request.

3. Of the non-zero values, 308 cases had values ranging from .003 to .74 with a mean value of .08 and a standard deviation of .14. The values were distributed fairly evenly across this range, with only ten cases with values over .5. An additional set of analyses were done with the outliers removed, yielding results similar to those presented here.

4. For a discussion of the advantages of Tobit regression models, see McDonald and Moffitt (1980: 318–19 and Long (1997: 189).

5. The farmer-based third-party movements associated with the Grange (such as the Greenbackers and the Readjusters) were most concerned with the state regulation of railroads and businesses associated with local commerce. Once winning office, an assortment of third-party backed state legislative candidates were able to influence the creation of state commissions to regulate railroads and were eventually credited with the passage of a series of highly controversial ‘Granger laws’ in four Midwestern states (Sanders 1999).

6. For the purposes of this research, ‘laws’ include both statewide statutes as well as state constitutional provisions regarding elections.

7. Fusion prohibitions are measured as specific prohibitions against listing a candidate’s name more than once on the ballot or as prohibitions against listing multiple parties after a candidate’s name. For example, the 1892 South Dakota Constitutional amendment provision stated that ‘no candidate’s name is to be printed in more than one column on the ballot, but a candidate nominated by two or more parties may choose in which column his name shall be placed’ (Dakota 1897). The data on fusion prohibitions in this research do not include any laws passed after 1912, as fusion ceased to posed a major threat to the major parties states after the Progressive successes of 1912 (Argersinger 1980). The use of write-in options was also determined by analysing the text of each state law as well as notes from Ludington (1911). Indications that blank spaces would be provided below candidates’ names indicated a valid write-in option (coded as 1). However, states making the use of this option difficult were not considered to have a valid write-in provision. An allowance for the use of ‘pasters’ in place a blank space was not considered to be a form of write-in, since it required voters to bring their own materials into the voting booth (indicating the name of the non-sanctioned candidate). Complicated instructions for using a write-in option also indicated that there was not a valid provision. For instance, in order to prevent a voter’s write-in from being invalidated, the 1891 laws of Maine, Michigan, and New Hampshire each required the voter to first check a straight ticket box, and then he must scratch out the names of the other candidates before writing in his new choice (Ludington 1911). Because exact signature requirements or fees for candidate ballot access for all states during this time period are not readily available (Hirano and Snyder Jr. 2007: 5), they are not included in this analysis.

8. The following states did not achieve statehood before 1920, did not achieve statehood before passing a ballot law, or did not pass a statewide ballot law before 1920: AK, AZ, GA, HI, MT, NC, NM, OK, SC, TN, UT, WY. Therefore, these states were not included in the analysis.

9. This required the addition of fixed effects for year, then rerunning each as a simple ordinary least squares model.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel C. Reed

Daniel C. Reed is an associate professor of political science at Radford University in Virginia, where he teaches courses in political parties, elections, and research methods. He received his MA and PhD in political science at the University of Georgia. Professor Reed's research focuses on parties and interest groups, elections, and election and campaign finance law. His most recent research examines the historical development of US ballot laws and their effects on voter mobilization, third parties, and voter turnout over time.