Crowded Out: The Effects of Concurrent Elections on Political Engagement, Candidate Evaluation, and Campaign Learning in the United States

Abstract

Holding multiple elections simultaneously, also known as concurrent elections, is well known to benefit electoral systems by increasing the rate of voter turnout. Essentially, the public becomes more willing to participate in voting because they can vote for more offices, and more prominent offices, at once and thus have a greater influence upon the functioning of government in a more efficient manner. However, very little is known about what happens with the electorate outside of the simple increase in voting. Just because citizens choose to vote, it does not mean that they actually pay attention to all the campaigns or feel that their participation is valuable. Using 20 years of American National Election Study survey data, and focusing primarily on the relatively low-salience House of Representatives, this paper examines the psychological effects of concurrent elections in the United States. It concludes that, while concurrent elections do boost turnout, lower-salience candidates receive less attention during concurrent elections, leading the public to rate them more negatively and know less about them. Higher-salience office candidates avoid these negative consequences. Thus there is a trade-off with concurrent elections – more people tend to vote when multiple offices are contested simultaneously but those voters also tend to focus on the higher offices and ignore the bottom of the ballot.