Why Americans Split Their Tickets: Campaigns, Competition, and Divided Government

In Why Americans Split Their Tickets, Barry C. Burden and David C. Kimball argue that divided government is produced unintentionally. Using a new quantitative method to analyze voting in presidential, House, and Senate elections from 1952 to 1996, they reject the dominant explanation for divided government, that ticket splitting is done to balance parties that are far from the center. The ideological positions of candidates do not matter in American elections, but voters favor centrist candidates rather than a mix of extremists. When candidates of opposing parties adopt similar platforms, ticket splitting arises. For voters, ideological differences between the parties blur and other considerations such as candidate characteristics exert a greater influence on their voting decisions. Among their other findings, the authors link changes in congressional campaigns—namely the rise of incumbency advantage and the greater importance of money in the 1960s and 1970s—to ticket splitting and argue, in addition, that the transformation of the South from a Democratic stronghold to a Republican-leaning environment has made regional factors less important.
Burden and Kimball draw upon a diverse and unique range of data as evidence for their argument. Their analyses rely on survey data, aggregate election returns, and new ecological inference estimates for every House and Senate election from 1952 to 1996. This approach allows for the examination of divided voting in traditional ways, such as choosing a Democratic presidential candidate and a Republican House candidate on a single ballot, to less traditional forms, such as voting in a midterm House election and choosing a state's Senate delegation.
Barry C. Burden is Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University. David C. Kimball is Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Missouri, St. Louis.

Why do some voters split their ballots, selecting a Republican for one office
and a Democrat for another? Why do voters often choose one party to control the
White House while the other controls the Congress? Citizens and politicians have
been grappling with the consequences of such "divided government" for thirty
years. In Why Americans Split their Tickets, Barry C. Burden and David C.
Kimball address these fundamental puzzles of American elections.

Burden and Kimball explain the causes of divided government and, rejecting the
dominant explanations for split-ticket voting, they debunk the myth that voters
prefer divided government to one-party control. Likewise, they make a case
against interpreting the frequency of divided government as a mandate for
compromise between the parties' extremist positions. Instead, the authors argue
that ticket splitting and divided government are the unintentional results of
lopsided campaigns and the blurring of party differences.

In Why Americans Split their Tickets, Burden and Kimball use new quantitative
methods to analyze the important changes in presidential, House, and Senate
campaigns in the latter half of the twentieth century. Their approach explains
the effects on voters' behavior of such developments as the rise of incumbency
advantage and the increasing importance of money to campaigns in the 1960s and
1970s. The authors also observe that ticket splitting has declined in recent
years. They link this emerging voting pattern to the sharpening policy
differences between parties, illuminating the ways that ideological positions of
candidates still matter in American elections.

Barry C. Burden is Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard University.

David C. Kimball is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University
of Missouri, St. Louis.