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.
“I match candidates to voter registration files to determine their party affiliation, even in nonpartisan races, which allows me to analyze how the Democrat, Republican, and unaffiliated candidates perform before and after the reforms,” Toman explained. “The introduction of party labels in school board elections reshapes political competition. Candidates from minority parties in each district are far less likely to run, creating partisan strongholds that often only feature a single candidate. Moreover, voters respond strongly to partisan cues. They are more likely to participate in school board elections and are more likely to vote for a co-partisan.”
The shift to partisan elections did more than change which party’s candidates enter. It also changed the types of candidates who step forward. Toman finds that once party affiliation was introduced, incumbents and school principals, individuals with experience in education and administration, became less likely to run.
“These are candidates who often understand school systems from the inside,” he explained. “But under partisan elections, those backgrounds seem to matter less for entry and success. Party labels make it easier for voters to know where candidates stand politically, but they also seem to discourage experienced or community-rooted individuals from running. In the long run, that could change who serves on school boards and how effectively they govern.”
As more states and districts across the United States consider introducing partisan school board elections, Toman hopes his findings will inform those debates.
“This paper exemplifies Dario’s strengths,” said Professor Ceren Baysan, a member of Toman’s supervisory committee. “It combines innovative use of administrative data, quasi-experimental design, and careful interpretation to address a first-order question. The trade-off he uncovers, between lowering voters’ information costs about candidate ideology and the quality of representation, has significant implications for our understanding of electoral competition and political selection.”
He applies the same analytical lens to his teaching, helping students see how economic reasoning explains the world around them. Toman has taught and assisted in courses across microeconomics, political economy, and development, where he encourages students to see how abstract models explain real policy challenges.
“Teaching non-economists has been especially rewarding,” he said. “It forces me to communicate ideas clearly and to show how economic reasoning applies to the institutions they encounter in daily life.”
Return to the Department of Economics website.
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