Electoral Innovation and the Alaska System: Partisanship and Populism Are Associated With Support for Top-4/Ranked-Choice Voting Rules

• Published date: 01 December 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129241263585
• Author: J. Andrew Sinclair,R. Michael Alvarez,Betsy Sinclair,Christian R. Grose
• Date: 01 December 2024

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2024, Vol. 77(4) 1196–1211

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129241263585

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Electoral Innovation and the Alaska

System: Partisanship and Populism Are

Associated With Support for Top-4/

Ranked-Choice Voting Rules

J. Andrew Sinclair

1

, R. Michael Alvarez

2

, Betsy Sinclair

3

, and Christian R.Grose

4



Abstract

In 2020, Alaskans voted to adopt a nonpartisan top-4 primary followed by a ranked-choice general election. Proposals for

“final four”and “final five”election systems are being considered in other states, as well as ranked-choice voting. The

initial use of Alaska’s procedure in 2022 serves as a test case for examining whether such reforms may help moderate

candidates avoid being “primaried.”In 2022, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-

endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka. We use data from the 2022 election in Alaska, alo ng with a mixed-mode survey of

Alaskan voters before the general election, to test hypotheses about how voters behave in these kinds of elections,

finding: (1) the moderate Republican candidate, Murkowski, likely would have lost a closed partisan primary; (2) some

Democrats and independents favored the moderate Republican over the candidate of their own party, and the new rules

allowed them to support her at all stages of the election, along with others who voted for her to stop the more

conservative Republican candidate; and (3) that Alaskan voters are largely favorable toward the new rules, but that

certain kinds of populist voters are likely to both support Trump and oppose the rules.

Keywords

primary elections, top-2 primary, top-4 primary, ranked-choice voting, populism, strategic voting

Over the last decade, political scientists have expressed

considerable alarm about the threat polarization and rising

populism pose for American political institutions, warn-

ing that the fabric of American democracy “can tatter only

so long before it rips”(McCarty 2019, 167). Some reform

advocates aim to reduce polarization and political dys-

function by modifying election rules and, in particular, by

reducing the risk that elected officials are “primaried”as

partisan punishment for moderate policy preferences or

cross-party compromise. Yet, scholarly research has ar-

rived at mixed conclusions about whether primary elec-

tion reforms produce the desired results (Barton 2023;

Grose 2020;Hirano and Snyder 2019, 296; Masket 2016;

McCarty 2019, 118; McGhee et al., 2014;Rackaway and

Romance 2022). In 2020, Alaska adopted one of the latest

innovations of this kind, Ballot Measure 2, instituting a

novel top-4 “pick one”primary followed by a ranked-

choice general election (a “top-4/RCV”system). There is

little research on voter behavior and election outcomes

using this new system. We examine the impact of the

top 4/RCV procedures on the outcome of Alaska’s

high-profile 2022 U.S. Senate election, voter behavior

under this system, and voter support for the new

institutions.

The Alaska rule uses the single-vote primary to reduce

the field of choices available in the ranked-choice general

election. In the primary, voters express only one prefer-

ence, with all of the alternatives for each office presented

1

Government Department, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont,

CA, USA

2

Division of Humanities and Social Science, Linde Center for Science,

Society, and Policy, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA,

USA

3

Department of Political Science, Washington University in St Louis, St

Louis, MO, USA

4

Department of Political Science and Intl. Relations, Department of

Public Policy and Management, University of Southern California, Los

Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

J. Andrew Sinclair, Government Department, Claremont McKenna

College, 859 Columbia Ave., Claremont, CA 91171, USA.

Email: asinclair@cmc.edu

as part of a common pool of candidates. The four can-

didates receiving the most votes advance. In the general

election, voters may rank those four candidates. In the

ranked-choice portion, votes for each worst-performing

candidate are reallocated to the next-ranked among the

remaining set of candidates until a candidate earns over

half of the vote. In 2022, the top-4/RCV electoral system

was used for elections to federal and state offices for the

first time. The U.S. Senate election featured multiple

candidates on the general election ballot, including two

serious contenders from the same party: Lisa Murkowski,

the incumbent Republican, and Kelly Tshibaka, a chal-

lenger endorsed by former President Donald Trump. This

general election was an early test of the expectations

motivating many advocates of these types of reforms.

Alaska’s top-4/RCV system is a nonpartisan election

reform related to, but more complex than, the top-2

systems in California and Washington. Scholars have

studied the top-2, but there has been little systematic

analysis of this new Alaska process. Other states, like

Nevada (Clyde 2022;Gehl and Porter 2020), are con-

sidering adopting similar rules, including a top-5/RCV

alternative (“final five”). An early look at the primary

stage of the Alaska election has suggested it may help

advance moderates (Anderson et al., 2023), but the

general election dynamics are important to evaluate as

well. It is particularly important to study the general

election stage of these top-4/RCV systems because so few

serious candidates are eliminated in the primary.

For our study we use official election returns and

survey data to study the first use of the top-4/RCV rule in

Alaska, particularly emphasizing the statewide general

election contests. We use our unique survey data, col-

lected just before the general election, to answer three

questions. First, since Murkowski voted against her own

party on several important occasions (Arkin 2021), did the

top-4/RCV help Murkowski avoid getting “primaried?”

Second, did Murkowski benefit from strategic behavior,

or was she sincerely the first choice of many Democrats?

Third, after participating in the new election system, how

did Alaskan voters evaluate the new process?

Key Findings

First, the electoral system is part of the explanation for

how Murkowski was able to defeat the Trump-endorsed

Republican for U.S. Senate. Given voter preferences, we

argue that Murkowski would have struggled to win re-

election in a system with traditional partisan primaries.

The electoral system is also part of the story for Democrat

Mary Peltola’s victory in the state’s U.S. House election.

Second, the top-4/RCV rulesprovide incentives for

strategic behavior, particularly in the general election.

Voters may wish to rank their true second-choice

preference ahead of their true first-choice preference if

they fear (a) their real first-choice may not ultimately

prevail against their least-preferred candidate and (b) their

real second-choice candidate may be able to win but risks

early elimination. Combining Democrats and Indepen-

dents in our survey data, we find that 21 percent self-

reported considering electability while ultimately decid-

ing to place Murkowski first. Nevertheless, the potential

for strategic behavior is only part of the story; a large bloc

of voters favored both Murkowski and Peltola as their first

choices, many of these apparently sincerely, and the new

rules allowed such voters to express these preferences

as well.

Third, voters’reactions to the new electoral system are

partisan, with Democrats and Independents favoring the

rules under which their preferred candidates were able to

win elections, even though the final-round Senate choice

came down to two Republicans, electing a Republican.

While more negative in their assessments, Republican

attitudes vary as well. Beyond partisanship, reactions to

the new rules correspond with the extent and type of

voters’populist beliefs. Voters with higher levels of anti-

expert or national-identity populist attitudes are more

likely to prefer closed partisan primaries over the top-4/

RCV, but voters with higher anti-elite populist attitudes

are no more likely to do so. These kinds of electoral

innovations are more compatible with certain kinds of

populist views than others.

What do our findings mean for our understanding of

how electoral systems affect voters? One implication is

that the top-4/RCV system has the potential to affect

individual-level voter outcomes, and will likely affect

election results, when there are two serious candidates of

the same party competing on the second-round general

election ballot. The possibility of same-party candidates

contending for position on the general election top-4/RCV

ballot is similar to the same-party elections that sometimes

occur with top-2 systems. In short, the top-4/RCV made a

difference in terms of which candidate won in part be-

cause it changed who, how, and when voters could make

their choice. Furthermore, preferences in favor of the top-

4/RCV system are associated with a voter being in a party

that is perceived as benefiting from the new system. Fi-

nally, attitudes toward election reform among voters are

conditioned by voter partisanship and voter populism.

What are the Theoretical and Empirical

Expectations for the Alaska Test Case

for Reform?

Ballot Measure 2, which created the top-4/RCV system,

passed in 2020 by a narrow margin (50.6–49.4 percent)

even though Trump beat Biden in Alaska that year (52.8–

Sinclair et al.1197