Dr David Andersen david.j.andersen@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor
Crowded Out: The Effects of Concurrent Elections on Political Engagement, Candidate Evaluation, and Campaign Learning in the United States
Andersen, David
Authors
Abstract
Holding multiple elections simultaneously, also known as concurrent elections, is well known to benefit electoral systems by increasing the rate of voter turnout. Essentially, the public becomes more willing to participate in voting because they can vote for more offices, and more prominent offices, at once and thus have a greater influence upon the functioning of government in a more efficient manner. However, very little is known about what happens with the electorate outside of the simple increase in voting. Just because citizens choose to vote, it does not mean that they actually pay attention to all the campaigns or feel that their participation is valuable. Using 20 years of American National Election Study survey data, and focusing primarily on the relatively low-salience House of Representatives, this paper examines the psychological effects of concurrent elections in the United States. It concludes that, while concurrent elections do boost turnout, lower-salience candidates receive less attention during concurrent elections, leading the public to rate them more negatively and know less about them. Higher-salience office candidates avoid these negative consequences. Thus there is a trade-off with concurrent elections – more people tend to vote when multiple offices are contested simultaneously but those voters also tend to focus on the higher offices and ignore the bottom of the ballot.
Citation
Andersen, D. (2023). Crowded Out: The Effects of Concurrent Elections on Political Engagement, Candidate Evaluation, and Campaign Learning in the United States. Representation: Journal of Representative Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2023.2261450
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Sep 18, 2023 |
Online Publication Date | Sep 27, 2023 |
Publication Date | 2023 |
Deposit Date | Oct 4, 2023 |
Publicly Available Date | Oct 4, 2023 |
Journal | Representation |
Print ISSN | 0034-4893 |
Electronic ISSN | 1749-4001 |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis Group |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2023.2261450 |
Keywords | Sociology and Political Science |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1756692 |
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Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
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