Returns to Sender Ballot Reform Partisan Institutions and the Electoral Consequences of American State Building
The introduction of the Australian ballot is widely credited with ushering in a new era of electoral accountability in American politics, yet existing research provides little direct evidence of its e ect on the electoral connection. In this paper, we examine how the Australian ballot a ected the relationship between members of Congress and their constituents by studying the relationship between U.S. House elections and the allocation of post o ces from 1876 to 1896. We nd strong evidence that the Australian ballot signi cantly increased the electoral returns to the allocation of federal post o ces. Prior to the introduction of the Australian ballot, we nd no evidence that incumbent party vote shares in the U.S. House were responsive to changes in the distribution of post o ces. With the introduction of the Australian ballot, however, vote shares were strongly responsive to the provision of post o ces. We also nd that the e ect of the Australian ballot was considerably greater in states with weak party organizations, which suggests that parties with strong electoral organizations could better insulate candidates and o ceholders from voter scrutiny when ballot reforms were implemented. Our results have important implications for understanding the conditions under which electoral institutions a ect democratic accountability. *We thank Alex Bluestone, Michael Byrne, Madeline Josel, Sophie Schuit, and Joe Sutherland for research assistance, and the O ce of Undergraduate Research at Washington University in St. Louis for funding. We also thank Cameron Blevins, Cathy Cohen, Justin Fox, Will Howell, Richard John, Sam Kernell, Doug Kriner, John Patty, and Andrew Reeves for helpful discussion and comments. +Corresponding author; Assistant Professor, Department of Government, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; rogowski@fas.harvard.edu. +Department of Economics, Campus Box 1208, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130; chris.gibson@ wustl.edu. Representative government turns on the capacity of citizens to sanction and reward elected o cials for their performance in o ce. In designing the American system of government, the Founders speci cally designed the executive and legislative branches with an eye toward how the procedures for selecting the president and members of Congress, respectively, would a ect those o ceholders' incentives. For instance, Madison wrote in Federalist 52 that "frequent elections are unquestionably the only policy" by which members of the House of Representatives would "have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people." Madison's intuition is re ected in contemporary political science understandings of legislative behavior which largely implicate the incentives provided by the re election imperative (e.g. Mayhew 1974) Although a sizable literature in political science demonstrates ways in which election outcomes are sensitive to legislative behavior (e.g. Canes Wrone, Brady and Cogan 2002; Carson et al. 2010) the agency relationship between citizens and legislators was weaker for the country's rst century. Nineteenth century legislators are often believed to have privileged their party's priorities over their constituents' interests. As the nineteenth century came to an end, Progressives identi ed ballot reform as among their top priorities, as the party printed ballot contributed to corruption and limited voters' ability to distinguish candidates from their parties (Engstrom and Kernell 2014; Katz and Sala 1996) In his history of ballot reform, Evans (1917, 15) wrote that party printed ballots failed "to supply any adequate method of acquainting the public with the names of the men they would be called upon the vote for su ciently in advance of the election to secure an examination into their quali cations. Nominations of corrupt or ine cient men were many times made too late for a public exposure, so the electorate went to the polls relying only on the honesty of their party, which many times betrayed them." According to this account, the party printed ballot system contributed to the public's lack of knowledge about their party's political candidates and undermined constituents' ability to create electoral incentives for legislative behavior. In this paper, we examine how the introduction of the Australian ballot a ected the electoral