A New Kind of Balancing Act: Electoral Certainty and Ticket-Splitting in the 1996 and 2000 Elections

Abstract

Using data from the 1996 and 2000 American National Election Studies, this article analyzes the behavior of voters who split their tickets, voting for one party’s presidential candidate and the opposing party’s House candidate, in presidential election years. We test the hypotheses that balancing behavior is likely to occur only when the outcome of the presidential election is relatively certain, and that balancing is most likely to occur among relatively sophisticated voters who have reservations about the policy positions of their preferred presidential candidate. The results of the study support the presence of this type of balancing behavior in the 1996 election and suggest that balancing can play an important role in producing divided government.