Prof. Devra Moehler to deliver talks at Harvard and MIT

Devra Moehler, Ph.D.

Annenberg’s Devra Moehler, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communication, will deliver the talk “Parties on the Ballot: Visual Cues and Voting Behavior in Uganda,” on Wednesday, Nov. 2 at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, and again on Nov. 5 at the Experiments in Governance and Politics Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

 

Many developing countries include candidate pictures and party symbols on electoral ballots in order to allow autonomous voting by citizens with little education and voting experience. Advocates of visual cues argue that they reduce error and they allow illiterate voters to identify candidates and parties and mark their ballots in private, rather than having to rely on assistance from others who may try to alter their votes. However, these symbols might themselves shape voter preferences—and, hence, election outcomes—in unintended ways.

 

In this seminar, Prof. Moehler describes how she conducted a survey experiment just days prior to the February 2011 elections in Uganda to test the effects of party identifiers and other features on ballot papers. The ballots included or excluded different visual and verbal cues about the real candidates running in four electoral contests. Preliminary findings suggest that respondents who received ballots with party identifiers were more likely to vote for major parties and less likely to vote for independents. They were also more likely to vote straight-party tickets. Party cues were consequential in the less salient, low-information races, but had no effect on the presidential race where conditions favor systematic processing. The evidence indicates that party cues on ballots are consequential for vote choice, even in a new and unstable party system.