Electoral Reform and Changes in Legislative Behavior: Adoption of the Secret Ballot in Congressional Elections

• Published date: 01 February 2015
• Author: Jamie L. Carson,Joel Sievert
• Date: 01 February 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12066

JAMIE L. CARSON

JOEL SIEVERT

University of Georgia

Electoral Reform and Changes

in Legislative Behavior:

Adoption of the Secret Ballot

in Congressional Elections

There is widespread agreement that the Australian ballot fundamentallyaltered the

American electoral system. One common approach to test the effects of ballot reform is

to examine legislators elected under the party and secret ballot. An alternative research

design, which we adopt here, compares changes in the behavior of legislators who were

elected under both ballot types. Weuse this approach to investigate whether ballot reform

directly inf‌luenced legislators’ decisions to seek renomination and their behavior within

the institution. Our results raise a number of important implications for understanding the

effects of electoral reform on political behavior.

The American political system underwent a remarkable array of

changes during the f‌inal two decades of the nineteenth century. In

response to the numerous excesses associated with the Gilded Age,

progressives pushed for a variety of electoral and institutional reforms in

an attempt to weaken the party bosses’ control over the electorate.Adop-

tion of the Australian (or secret) ballot was one such reform, which had

an immediate and lasting impact on the U.S. electoral landscape. Secret

ballots f‌irst appeared in the 1888 presidential election and were used in

approximately 7% of all congressional elections that year. By 1892, over

75% of all congressional races were conducted using the secret ballot,

and the number quickly approached 90% in subsequent elections.

Prior to the adoption of the Australian ballot in the late nineteenth

century, the political parties, rather than individual states, printed and

distributed ballots for voters to use when they went to the polls. These

party-controlled ballots provided the parties with considerable inf‌luence

over access to the ballot (Carson and Roberts 2013). For instance, parties

could regulate who participated in the elections as well as monitor who

individual citizens were voting for when they showed up at the polls on

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 40, 1, February 2015 83

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12066

© 2015 The Comparative Legislative Research Center of The University of Iowa

Election Day. This arrangement made voters, candidates, and elected

off‌icials more dependent on the parties in a way not found in the con-

temporary electoral system.

By severing these ties, theAustralian ballot has been widely viewed

as fundamentally altering both the American electoral system and politi-

cal institutions (see, e.g., Katz and Sala 1996; Rusk 1970; Ware 2002). In

the modern era where all elections are administered by the states, it can

be hard to fully appreciate the magnitude of these changes. Indeed, it is

important to remember that the Australian ballot was the f‌irst in a series

of reforms that eventually produced the modern U.S. electoral system.

Ballot reforms predate other electoral changes like the direct primary,

direct election of U.S. senators, and reporting requirements for federal

campaign expenditures by a decade or more. In this way, ballot reforms

were a crucial step in modernizing elections and ultimately facilitated the

adoption of subsequent electoral reforms (Ware 2002).

As with any institutional change of this magnitude, ballot reforms

led to a number of unanticipated outcomes that were diff‌icult, if not

impossible, to reverse once they were in place (Pierson 2000). Ware

(2002) contends that while the parties were largely supportive of ballot

reform, these changes would facilitate the subsequent adoption of direct

primaries, an outcome the parties did not anticipate. These unexpected

consequences, however, are the reason that the transition to the secret

ballot is still relevant well over a century after its adoption. Untangling

the relationship between electoral rules and legislative behavior can be

valuable for evaluating and adjudicating between different reform pro-

posals or types of electoral rules. Our analysis also has implications

beyond the United States given political scientists’ broad interest in the

electoral implications of ballot design and electoral rules (Reynolds and

Steenbergen 2006). By examining the adoption of theAustralian ballot in

America, we can draw on and speak to studies that examine similar

questions in a comparative or country-specif‌ic context outside of the

United States. In this way, our analysis can add to the larger body of

comparative research on the effect of electoral rules.

Our article proceeds as follows. We begin by recounting the back-

ground and history of the secret ballot as well as its effects on our

electoral system. Next, we discuss the theoretical linkage between ballot

reform and changes in legislative behavior. From there, we outline our

key hypotheses and propose a research design to test these expectations.

The research design, which applies a crossover design from randomized

experiments to observational data (Imai et al. 2011), is of note because it

provides a more direct test of the effect of ballot reform than do prior

studies. We then conduct a variety of empirical analyses and f‌ind that

84 Jamie L. Carson and Joel Sievert