Are Alternative Voting Methods Ideologically Biased? Evidence from the 2022 Italian Election

Abstract One key component of electoral systems is ballot design. This paper focuses on the consequences of alternative – more expressive – ballot designs in terms of party performance and voter behavior. Expressive voting methods are expected to reduce wasted votes and vote splitting, potentially penalizing polarizing parties and favoring consensual ones. Yet, empirical studies show that far-right candidates perform worse under alternative rules, raising concerns about ideological asymmetry. We test this prediction in a limit case: the 2022 Italian general election, where the far-right party Brothers of Italy (FdI) was projected to win. Using an original pre-electoral online survey with a nationally representative sample ( N = 1,021), we simulate party rankings and vote shares under multiple alternative voting rules: ranked-choice, approval, score, and evaluative voting. Under all tested methods, FdI would have remained the largest party. Performance shifts primarily reflect the attenuation of strategic overstatement for viable parties and coalition dynamics rather than ideological orientation. Quorum and top-three parties lose relative support, whereas smaller coalition parties gain modestly. We further examine party exclusivity through co-approvals and distributional analysis as well as voter exclusivity through bullet voting, extreme-grade voting, and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) dimension reduction. Neither form of exclusivity is systematically associated with ideological orientation. These findings suggest that, in mixed electoral systems, viability incentives are stronger predictors of party performance than ideological polarization under alternative voting methods.