What happens when local elections include party affiliations on the ballot? Dario Toman, a PhD Candidate with the Department of Economics, examined how adding parties to local ballots reshapes who runs for office, who wins, and how voters make decisions. In his job market paper, Partisan Elections, Competition, and Candidate Selection: Evidence from School Boards, Toman’s findings show that this change can have far-reaching consequences for local democracy.
Since 2014, many school boards across North Carolina have introduced partisan elections, listing candidates’ party affiliations directly on the ballot. The change has been rolled out gradually, with party affiliations introduced in 39 school boards over the past decade. The recent nature of these changing conditions made the state’s school board elections especially interesting to study the role of party affiliation in shaping local election outcomes in the U.S. The district-by-district implementation of the rules for trustee elections allowed Toman to estimate the causal effects of adding party labels to candidate names on the ballot. [Read more…]
