New Research: Alaska Top- 4/RCV

Happy to report that we have recently published an innovative survey-based study of the new Top-4/RCV voting process that is used in Alaska. The paper was just published online in the peer-reviewed Political Research Quarterly. We are still working to get the paper to be available open access, until that happens, here is a link to a preprint version of our paper.

Our study uses innovative survey data collected in 2022, during the first use of this voting process in Alaska. The research was conducted in collaboration with Christian Grose (University of Southern California), Betsy Sinclair (Washington University - St. Louis), and Andrew Sinclair (Claremont McKenna College). This study is part of a broader examination that we are in conducting about state primary procedures, in particular innovations like the Top-2 in California and the Top-4/RCV in Alaska.

Here’s the paper’s abstract:

In 2020, Alaskans voted to adopt a nonpartisan top-4 primary followed by a ranked-choice general election. Proposals for “final four” and “final five” election systems are being considered in other states, as well as ranked-choice voting. The initial use of Alaska’s procedure in 2022 serves as a test case for examining whether such reforms may help moderate candidates avoid being “primaried.” In 2022, incumbent Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski held her seat against a Trump-endorsed Republican, Kelly Tshibaka. We use data from the 2022 election in Alaska, along with a mixed-mode survey of Alaskan voters before the general election, to test hypotheses about how voters behave in these kinds of elections, finding: (1) the moderate Republican candidate, Murkowski, likely would have lost a closed partisan primary; (2) some Democrats and independents favored the moderate Republican over the candidate of their own party, and the new rules allowed them to support her at all stages of the election, along with others who voted for her to stop the more conservative Republican candidate; and (3) that Alaskan voters are largely favorable toward the new rules, but that certain kinds of populist voters are likely to both support Trump and oppose the rules.

If you are interested in more of our research on primary process reform, I suggest that you start with the book that Andrew Sinclair and I published about the California Top-2, Nonpartisan Primary Election Reform: Mitigating Mischief. Andrew has a series of excellent papers following up on the work in our book. Christian has published a great study about how open primary procedures are associated with legislative moderation. Here’s an earlier study that Betsy and I did focusing on the blanket primary in California and how it was associated with changes in legislative behavior. Our team has done quite a bit of research study