How Do People React When They Can't Vote How They Want? The Relationship Between the Public and Democratic Institutions

Abstract

In this three-paper dissertation, I examine how people react when democratic institutions function sub-optimally in two contexts: when political parties fail to field a candidate for office and thus allow another political party to win automatically, and when voters have a poor experience at the polling place in the process of casting their ballot. In the first paper, I use a regression discontinuity design, nationwide precinct-level election results, and survey data from 2016 to show that there is a down-ballot electoral penalty when parties don’t have a candidate for Congress on the ballot. This pattern appears to be mostly due to increased voter roll-off as well as some evidence of voters casting a split-ticket down-ballot. In the second paper, I use a survey experiment and other survey data to show that some survey respondents do seem to believe that it is political parties’ responsibility to find candidates for office, and also show that the potential mechanism for the down-ballot penalty in the first paper is protest voting. In the third paper, I use an original survey experiment and data from a nationwide survey in 2016 to show that under certain circumstances encountering a problem while voting slightly reduces voter roll-off, but respondents did not appear to distinguish between long lines due to malfeasance or those due to innocent errors by election officials. This dissertation makes contributions to political science’s understanding of the relationship between democratic institutions and the public, to the theory of protest voting, and to the understanding of voter roll-off.