The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6447007 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Arjun Vishwanath (0000-0002-1048-1579, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 409-437 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Quarterly Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1554-0626 • E-ISSN: 1554-0634 |
| Publisher | Now Publishers (PUBLISHER • NL) |
| DOI | 10.1561/100.00023123 |
| OpenAlex | W4411426803 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 33 |
Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an increasingly popular electoral institution that has been posited by reformers and media outlets to produce transformative effects on electoral outcomes and representation. However, there is little social scientific evidence available that evaluates these claims. I test the effects of RCV on municipal fiscal outcomes and the ideological composition of city councils. I also estimate RCV’s effects on these outcomes relative to public opinion — in other words, whether RCV narrows the gap between outcomes and mass policy preferences. This article finds no empirical support for the proposition that RCV changed fiscal outcomes or the ideological composition of city councils — both on absolute terms and relative to mass opinion. Furthermore, the roll-call based ideal points of legislators serving before and after RCV did not change, and the relationship between city district opinion and city legislator ideology is unchanged post-adoption. Taken as a whole, this article does not find evidence that RCV has produced the types of transformative political effects that reformers have postulated
Cardinal voting systems · Econometrics · Economics · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Representation (politics · Voting · Voting behavior · Game Theory and Voting Systems · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
Policy Polarization and Strategic Candidacy in Elections under the Alternative-Vote Rule
City Limits
Hometown Inequality
Ranked Choice Voting and Attitudes toward Democracy in the United States
Information and Wasted Votes
Writing the Rules to Rank the Candidates
Response to Matsusaka
Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers
Are Donation-Based Measures of Ideology Valid Predictors of Individual-Level Policy Preferences
Politics in Forgotten Governments
Comparing Campaign Finance and Vote-Based Measures of Ideology
Mayoral Partisanship and Municipal Fiscal Policy
Reform and Representation
Representativeness and Motivations of the Contemporary Donorate
Estimating Candidates’ Political Orientation in a Polarized Congress
Matching Methods for Causal Inference with Time‐Series Cross‐Sectional Data
Mapping the Ideological Marketplace
Public Money Talks Too
When Mayors Matter
Low-Information Voting
Campaign civility under preferential and plurality voting
The alternative vote
Ballot (and voter) "exhaustion" under Instant Runoff Voting
Evidence of a winning-cohesion tradeoff under multi-winner ranked-choice voting
Party Competition and Coalitional Stability
Representation in Municipal Government
Electoral Accountability for State Legislative Roll Calls and Ideological Representation
The Ideological Mapping of American Legislatures
Off-Cycle and Off Center
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |