Alphabet Soup: Randomized Ballot Order and the Representation of Marginalized Candidates

Prior work finds that candidates benefit from being listed first on the ballot. Other research finds that candidates from historically marginalized groups, such as women and ethnic minorities, fare worse in low-salience and low-information contexts. We therefore ask whether being listed first---an increase in salience---benefits historically marginalized candidates more or less than ethnic majority and/or male candidates. We test whether women and ethnic minority candidates are helped or harmed by randomly being listed first on the ballot relative to men and white candidates using both a natural experiment and a survey experiment. We use data on over 29,000 California local elections from 1995-2021 in which ballot order was randomly varied and a survey experiment manipulating hypothetical candidates’ ethnicity, gender, and order on a ballot. In both data sources we find a premium to being listed first on the ballot---but that non-white candidates, especially non-white women, benefit significantly more than white candidates from this effect. We close by discussing the implications of election design for equality of representation.