Given the institutional bias against minor parties in the U.S., why do minor party candidates run for office? In this article, we seek to answer this question by developing a model of the choice to participate in gubernatorial elections by minor party candidates that takes into account both the political opportunities potential candidates have to participate and the legal hurdles they must overcome to do so. We test our theory using an event count model of the number of minor party candidates in gubernatorial elections from 1982 to 2000. We find that state electoral rules, such as ballot access restrictions, and the level of competition between the two major parties within the state matter the most. In other words, the decision to run as a third party gubernatorial candidate may be an individual one but it is structured in important ways by the institutional environment within which those decisions are made.
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