Prevailing Party laws and general election outcomes

Abstract Objective This article examines the incidence and effects of the most common ballot ordering procedure used in U.S. general elections, Prevailing Party laws, which give the most advantageous ballot position to the currently prevailing political party. Methods Panel regression and regression discontinuity analyses are applied to almost 50 years of county‐level election data from Wyoming. Results Prevailing Party laws generally increase the favored candidate's vote share by two percentage points or more, enough to flip the result of roughly 1 percent of major elections nationwide. Conclusions The effect of Prevailing Party laws is substantially larger than that of more innocuous ballot ordering schemes, due to “endorsement effects” these other schemes lack. The existing literature, which exclusively analyzes these other schemes, substantially understates the degree to which ballot order can be used to maintain political power.