Campaign civility under preferential and plurality voting Todd Donovan a, * , Caroline Tolbert b , Kellen Gracey b a Political Science, Western Washington University, United States b Political Science, University of Iowa, United States article info Article history: Received 29 July 2014 Received in revised form 11 February 2016 Accepted 11 February 2016 Available online 27 February 2016 Keywords: Preferential voting Campaigns Electoral systems Alternative Vote Ranked choice voting Negative campaigns abstract We present reasons to expect that campaigns are less negative under preferential voting. We then examine if preferential voting systems affect how people perceive the conduct of elections. This paper reports results from surveys designed to measure voters‘ perceptions of candidates’ campaigns, comparing places with plurality elections to those that used preferential voting rules. Our surveys of voters indicate that people in cities using preferential voting were significantly more satisfied with the conduct of local campaigns than people in similar cities with plurality elections. People in cities with preferential voting were also less likely to view campaigns as negative, and less likely to respond that candidates were frequently criticizing each other. Results are consistent across a series of robustness checks. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This paper examines if electoral systems affect how people perceive campaigns and elections. We test if the type of electoral system affects levels of negativity in election campaigns by isolating, at least partially, the effects of plurality versus preferen- tial voting. Elections in nearly all US cities are conducted under some variant of plurality, winner-take-all rules, where each voter has the capacity to express a preference for a single candidate. However, a handful of US cities have adopted preferential voting, where voters may rank their preferences for multiple candidates. We propose that the latter system may affect rival candidates' in- centives to engage in negative campaigns, thus affecting voter perceptions. The American case, then, provides a unique opportu- nity for systematic, empirical tests of this intuition. 1. Campaigns under preferential versus plurality voting Most local elections in the US are conducted with plurality voting. However, in the past decade a number of US cities adopted the Alternative Vote, a form of preferential voting that is commonly referred to as Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in the United States. Both election systems are used to elect a single candidate to a single office (e.g. a single-member districted city council position, a single city-wide city council position, the office of mayor, etc.). In standard plurality elections a voter can cast one vote for a candidate seeking a position, and that vote is non transferable. Preferential voting systems such as RCV in contrast, allow voters to express ranked preferences for multiple candidates seeking a single office. 1 We propose that there are reasons to expect that these electoral systems affect incentives candidates have to engage in negative campaigns and that this affects voter perceptions of campaign tone. Consider the incentives that Candidate X might face campaigning against Candidate Y under different electoral systems. At the very least, plurality voting offers Candidate X rather weak incentives to make positive appeals to voters who are probable supporters of Candidate Y (or other candidates in the race). Candidate Y's sup- porters generally have but one preference to cast, and that prefer- ence is always non transferable. Furthermore, the plurality context may make it more likely that campaigns are conducted in a winner- take-all, zero-sum context. Under such conditions (and possibly contingent on the number of candidates, see Skarperdas and Grofman (1995)), Candidate X may have relatively strong in- centives to criticize and attack Candidate Y and maximize (or * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: Todd.Donovan@wwu.edu (T. Donovan), caroline-tolbert@ uiowa.edu (C. Tolbert), kellen-gracey@uiowa.edu (K. Gracey). 1 The Alternative Vote is the most common form of preferential voting adopted in the US recently. The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is used in Cambridge MA to fill multiple seats. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Electoral Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2016.02.009 0261-3794/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Electoral Studies 42 (2016) 157e163