Choice Overload in Crowded Primary Elections

• Published date: 01 January 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X241281246
• Author: Spencer Goidel,Brenna Armstrong
• Date: 01 January 2025

Article

American Politics Research

2025, Vol. 53(1) 3–16

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X241281246

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Choice Overload in Crowded Primary

Elections

Spencer Goidel

1

and Brenna Armstrong

2



Abstract

The number of candidates running in U.S. primary elections is increasing. Contested primary elections force voters to decide

between candidates that share party labels and are ideologically similar. Similar to contexts of non-partisan elections, an increase

in the number of candidates should exacerbate the cognitive demand of voting in primary elections. We expect largecandidate

fields in primaries make voters (1) spend less time looking at each candidateprofile, (2) more likely to abstain, (3) more likely to

vote based on ballot position, and (4) more likely to feel overwhelmed with the decision. All four of these expectations were

preregistered. We test the effect of large candidate fields on voter behavior using a survey experiment (n= 2000) fielded by

YouGov. We find large candidate fields cause respondents to spend less time looking at candidateprofiles, to select candidates

in the first half of the ballot, and to feel overwhelmed by the decision-making process. In contrast to our expectati ons, we find

large candidate fields make respondents less likely to abstain.

Keywords

candidate preference, decision-making strategies, choice overload, survey experiment, primary elections

Historically, the United States has been considered a simple

electoral system, in that it prioritizes governing majorities over

proportionate representation via first-past-the-post, single-

member districts (Carey and Hix 2011). In these elections,

voters traditionally made decisions in general elections, selecting

between a Democratic and a Republican candidate. However, in

contemporary politics, the American voter is facing a new choice

set. Rather than making a choice during the general election

between labeled, partisan candidates, voters are seeing their

choices moved to the primary stage (Hirano & Snyder, 2014). As

the number of seats only winnable by one party increases, many

candidates with political ambition see the primary stage as the

only avenue for success. The impact of decreasing partisan

competitiveness has been especially pronounced in the evolution

of U.S. House elections (Abramowitz, Alexander, & Gunning,

2006). The number of candidates running in contested House

primary elections has steadily increased over the past decade (per

Figure 1).

1

On average, two more candidates are running in

contested House elections in 2020 than in 2010–7.3 candidates

versus 5.2 candidates. Some of the more extreme outliers feature

15-plus candidates running in one party’s primary. For example,

21 candidates sought the Republican nomination for Missouri’s

Senate election in 2022,

2

and 16 sought the Republican nomi-

nation for Tennessee’sfirst congressional district in 2020.

3

While

these crowded primaries make interesting headlines, they also

complicate the process of selecting a party nominee. These larger

candidate fields place a greater burden on voters already tasked

with voting in these low-information, low-attention primary

elections. We argue the number of candidates in a primary

election affects the strategies voters employ to make a vote choice,

the resulting vote choice itself, and evaluation of the choice.

A growing body of research looks at the effects of large

candidate fields on voters in the comparative context. As the

number of candidates in an election increases, voters are more

likely to votefor the first or last candidate on the ballot (Cunow

et al., 2021;S¨

oderlund, vonSchoultz, & P apageorgiou, 2021),

more likely to cast an invalid vote or abstain (Cohen, 2018a;

Dettrey & Schwindt-Bayer, 2009),and less likely to cast

preference votes (Andr´

e & Depauw, 2017;Nagler, 2015).

These large elections place informational demands on voters

that affect their decision-making processes at the ballot box.

Voters navigating these larger candidate fields spend less time

acquiring information and making a decision (Cunow et al.,

2021), and instead rely on cheap heuristics, such as candidate

name or race (Aguilar et al., 2015;Muraoka, 2021). While

previous research focuses on crowdedelections in Latin

1

Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

2

Rice University, Houston, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Spencer Goidel, Auburn University, 8022 Haley Center, Auburn, AL 36849,

USA.

Email: goidel@auburn.edu