New Approach to the Study of Ticket-Splitting

This dataset contains presidential and congressional election totals at the state and congressional district level for 1988. Using a new solution to the ecological inference problem developed by Gary King, the investigators used these data to estimate the proportion of voters splitting their ballots in each electoral unit. The variation in ticket-splitting across electoral units was then examined. The investigators found that, contrary to balancing arguments, voters were not intentionally splitting their tickets to produce divided government and moderate policies. In most cases split outcomes were a byproduct of lopsided congressional campaigns that featured well-funded, high-quality candidates versus unknown competitors, and split-ticket voting was largely unintentional.