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The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation

Arjun Vishwanath

Quarterly Journal of Political Science2025https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00023123article
AJG 3ABDC B
Weight
0.41

What the paper says

Ranked choice voting (RCV) is an increasingly popular electoral institution that has been posited by reformers and media outlets to produce transformative effects on electoral outcomes and representation. However, there is little social scientific evidence available that evaluates these claims. I test the effects of RCV on municipal fiscal outcomes and the ideological composition of city councils. I also estimate RCV’s effects on these outcomes relative to public opinion — in other words, whether RCV narrows the gap between outcomes and mass policy preferences. This article finds no empirical support for the proposition that RCV changed fiscal outcomes or the ideological composition of city councils — both on absolute terms and relative to mass opinion. Furthermore, the roll-call based ideal points of legislators serving before and after RCV did not change, and the relationship between city district opinion and city legislator ideology is unchanged post-adoption. Taken as a whole, this article does not find evidence that RCV has produced the types of transformative political effects that reformers have postulated.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00023123

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@article{arjun2025,
  title        = {{The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation}},
  author       = {Arjun Vishwanath},
  journal      = {Quarterly Journal of Political Science},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1561/100.00023123},
}

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The Effects of Ranked Choice Voting on Substantive Representation

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Evidence weight

0.41

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10
M · momentum0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.