Order in Chaos: Ballot Order Effects in a Post-Conflict Election?

Abstract

Ballot order effects are well documented in established democracies, but less so in fragile post-

conflict settings. We test for the presence of ballot order effects in the 2010 parliamentary election

in Afghanistan. Turning out for the 2010 election was a potentially life-threatening endeavor for the

Afghan voter. The election provides a first look at ballot order effects in a high stakes, post-conflict

setting. In this setting limited cognitive skills and information are more likely explanations of

potential ballot order effects than mechanisms of lacking of effort or ambivalence of choice.

Importantly, we find no evidence of a positive effect on the vote share of a higher ballot position.

Keywords: ballot order effects; biases; conflict; post-conflict elections, Afghanistan

Word count: 1,986

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INTRODUCTION

Democratic elections are the mechanism by which legitimate political leadership is chosen in most

developed countries. Thus we like to think of candidate choice as a thoughtful process governed by

the policy preferences of voters. Yet ballot order effects in democratic elections are well

documented across a number of different countries and election settings (Miller & Krosnick, 1998;

Krosnick et al. 2004; Koppell & Steen, 2004; Kim et al. 2013; Webber et al. 2014). Ballot order

effects entail that candidates placed higher on the ballot receive more votes solely due to their ballot

position. Often these effects are estimated as primacy effects of being the first candidate on the list.

For instance, Miller and Krosnick (1998) found that candidates listed first in 1992 Ohio election had

an electoral advantage over candidates listed below the top spot.

Here we test for the presence of ballot order effects in the case of the 2010 parliamentary election in

Afghanistan. The elections provide a first look at ballot order effects in a high stakes, post-conflict

setting. Participating in the 2010 election was a dangerous choice. Both the UN and US security

expects had warned of potential threats to the safety of voters, and around 8 percent of the 5,816

voting locations were closed due to security concerns. Indeed, people had good reasons to expect

violence since the period surrounding the presidential election in the previous year had seen the

highest number of civilian casualties since the fall of the Taleban in 2002 (AIHRC-UNAMA, 2009).

On election day itself news agencies reported that at least 14 people were killed (BBC Online,

2010). Partly as a consequence of the increased threat level, only 3.9 million of the 10 million

eligible voters turned out.

What then could be the underlying mechanism of ballot order effects in the case of Afghanistan?

Kim et al. (2013) find that ballot order effects are stronger for voters who 1) have little information

about the candidates, 2) feel ambivalence about candidates, 3) have limited cognitive skills, and 4)

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allocate little effort to candidate evaluation. These factors all tend to make voters more susceptible

to arbitrary order effects. We argue that some of these factors are more likely to explain potential

ballot order effects in the Afghan setting. On the one hand we can expect that the high illiteracy of

the Afghan electorate and lack of experience with democratic elections imply that the electorate has

limited candidate information and cognitive skills to deploy for candidate selection. This should

translate into potentially strong ballot order effects. On the other hand we can expect the post-

conflict setting of Afghanistan to provide strong incentives for picking the right candidate. This

argument is in line with Ho & Imai (2008) who find that ballot order effects disappear in high

stakes US elections. We may view Afghanistan as an extreme case of this. Further, the potential

life-threatening act of voting should induce those selecting into turnout to have a clear and

consciously conceived idea of who to vote for. People who do not care much about the act of voting

or the outcome of it would be unlikely to brave the dangers of election day in Afghanistan. On

balance, we therefore have mechanisms at work which should both enhance and reduce ballot order

effects in the case of Afghanistan. The paper is thereby able to shed some light on the relative

weight of the mechanisms underlying ballot order effects: If we find ballot order effects in

Afghanistan, then limited information and cognitive skills are more likely explanations than lacking

effort and ambivalence.

DATA AND DESIGN

On the 18th of September 2010 Afghan parliamentary election were held. The parliamentary

elections determined who were to be members of the Wolesi Jirga (the House of the People). Our

data consists of ballot information and elections results from each of the 34 provinces for this

election. We have obtained the total number of votes obtained for each candidate in every province

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along with their ballot position (IEC 2013). In the smallest district the ballot contained 12

candidates while the largest district of Kabul had 664 candidates (Median = 47).

Afghanistan is a particular well-suited case to study ballot order effects due to its single non-

transferable voting system (SNTV). Each voter casts one vote for a candidate in a set of potentially

unlimited number of candidates. The candidates receiving the most votes fill the predefined number

of seats allocated to each electoral district. The SNTV impedes the development of political parties

as votes cannot be transferred among candidates (Goodhand & Sedra 2007; Tadjbakhsh &

Schoiswohl 2008). Therefore, elections to the Wolesi Jirga involve large numbers of independent

candidates and in 2010 more than 2500 candidates contested a total of 249 seats. All of the elected

candidates were independents.

Ballot order in Afghanistan is determined by a random lottery which allows the data generating

process to be treated as a randomized experiment. However, if strong ballot order effects exist and

if these are known there will be equally strong incentives to manipulate the ballot order by political

or administrative elites (Meredith & Salant 2013). This poses a particular problem in a highly

corrupt state such as Afghanistan. Any manipulation of the candidate order would invalidate the

natural experimental setting by inducing unobservable confounders affecting both order an election

outcomes. One way of testing for manipulation is to make sure that candidate order is uncorrelated

with candidate background characteristics.

We conduct two such tests. First, we look for irregularities in the distribution of women on each

ballot. In Afghanistan’s highly religious and patriarchal society we would expect that intentional

manipulation of the ballot order would result in lower average ballot order position for women.

However, the data shows that there is no significant difference in the ballot order position of male

and female candidates (d=0.7, p=0.913). Second, for the candidates elected we observe if they are

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incumbents or not. If manipulation of ballot order had taken place we would expect elected

incumbents to have a higher ballot position than elected non-incumbents as the former would have

been able to leverage their position in the manipulation effort. Again the data does not suggest that

this is the case (d=21.5, p=0.288). In summary, we find it plausible to assume that candidate order

was not manipulated and was therefore exogenous to any candidate qualities or resources which

could affect their vote share.

EMPIRICAL FINDINGS

The main findings are presented in figure 1. Here the candidates’ relative ballot position is plotted

against each candidate’s vote share.1 For the full sample we see no significant effect of ballot

position on a candidate’s vote share (b=0.001, p=0.409). This null result is also robust to the

exclusion of the Kabul district, which has a much longer ballot than the others (b=0.002, p=0.409).

Further, the results hold if we use logged ballot position and control for logged ballot length

(b=0.001, p=0.703) or only estimate the model on districts with ballot length below the median of

46 (b=0.01, p=0.086).

1 Using the relative vote share is standard in existing studies (King & Leigh 2009)

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FIGURE 1

Another way of measuring ballot order effects is to compare vote shares of those at the very top of

the ballot with everybody else (Meredith & Salant 2013). Here we continue to control for logged

ballot length to account for the fact that smaller lists come with larger average vote shares for each

candidate and increase the probability of a given candidate being at the top of the list.

On average the first candidate on the ballot got a somewhat larger vote share than everybody else

but the difference is not significant (d=0.141, p=0.776). This effect is marginally significant if we

compare the top ten (d=0.461, p=0.045) but not significant for the top five (d=0.148, p=0.525).

However, the top ten-effect is driven entirely by three outliers. If these are removed the effect

disappears (d=0.287, p=0.209). On balance we do not find any support for the idea of ballot order

effects in Afghanistan.

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CONCLUSION

Some have downplayed the substantive effects of ballot order on democratic outcomes (Miller and

Krosnick 1998). Others find that order effects have actually been pivotal in deciding between

winners and losers in high stake elections (Koppel and Steen 2008). The findings presented here

find no support for a ballot order effect for the case of Afghanistan. Turning out for the 2010

Afghan election was a dangerous business. The absence of ballot order effects in the chaotic post-

conflict setting of Afghanistan points to limits of the phenomenon which has previously has been

identified for elections of varying importance in stable democracies. The findings raise the question

if ballot order effects are mainly driven by an overburdened and ambivalent electorate in low stakes

Western democratic elections. We have argued that the dangers, high stakes, and clear conflict lines

in Afghanistan should lead to a high level of effort and a low level of ambivalence in the average

voter turning out. At the same time the high Afghan illiteracy rate and lack of experience with

democratic elections should imply that the electorate has limited cognitive skills and information.

The null finding point to that the latter was not a sufficient condition for the electorate to use

candidate order as a short cut. The finding raises the broader question of how generalizable

anomalies found in political behavior in the developed world are to post-conflict democracies.

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