Abstract
In November 2017, New Orleans elected the first woman, and first Black woman, mayor in the city’s history. Voters were unable to rely on gender, race, or partisanship to differentiate between the candidates in the race. How, then, do voters make decisions absent traditional heuristics? Using an analysis of campaign materials and two-wave panel survey, we show that the candidates sent ideological signals with endorsements and issue foci and that voters responded by placing the candidates ideologically. Those voters who could not differentiate between the candidates’ ideologies were less likely to turn out to vote and took longer to decide in the elections. Using a new measure of relative ideological distance adopted for multicandidate races, we show that the distance between each voter and the nearest candidates correlated with vote choice. Our results add to our knowledge of voting behavior and the use of ideology in local elections.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
