Evidence of a Winning-cohesion Tradeoff
under Multi-winner Ranked-choice Voting
Jack Santucci∗
November 17, 2017
Forthcoming in Electoral Studies

Abstract
New interest in “multi-winner ranked-choice voting” raises oldquestions about effects on party cohesion. Earlier writers thought
this single transferable vote (STV) rule was net-problematic for parties. This paper consults the roll-call record in Cincinnati (1929-57)
and Worcester, Mass. (1949-60), two of three American STV implementations that produced conventional wisdom. First, I show how
party cohesion could be high or low. Then I show how low-cohesion
terms followed elections in which candidates campaigned for themselves over their parties. Finally, I show that parties endorsed suchcandidates when they needed the votes to expand their seat shares.
In sum, the data suggest a strategic environment in which majorityseeking parties reach beyond their traditional bases – potentially atthe expense of legislative cohesion. Whether that is good or bad depends on the value we give party discipline.
Keywords: ranked-choice voting, single transferable vote, party cohesion, party change.
∗

The author thanks Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute for funding required travel. Hunter Books and Jasmine Underwood helped get and/or enter the data.
Carolyn Ford, Paulette Leeper, and Amy Searcy of the Hamilton County Board of Elections provided election returns for Cincinnati. Niko Vangjeli of the Worcester Election
Commission found his city’s election returns, which Howard Fain in turn had rescued
from the attic of Robert Bowditch, Sr. On the paper, Kent Weaver, Matthew Shugart,
Hans Noel, and Dan Hopkins gave invaluable feedback. Contact: jack@voteguy.com.

1

U.S. Representative Don Beyer (D-VA) has introduced legislation to use
multi-winner ranked-choice voting for U.S. House elections. Meanwhile, organizers in Amherst (MA) and Santa Cruz (CA) hope to join Cambridge(MA) and Minneapolis in using it for local elections. In political science andaround the world, this system is known as proportional representation via
the single transferable vote – hereafter STV.1
The Beyer proposal leaves party leaders few ways to deny people accessto office. By lowering electoral thresholds in primaries as well as generalelections, the STV bill would give small groups an easier path to power thanthe current system, wherein party leaders retain significant influence over
who can win a primary election (Salam and Richie 2017; Hassell 2015; Cohenet al. 2008). Reformers’ proposal for local elections is even more extreme:
nomination by petition. Twenty-three cities adopted and repealed this typeof STV between 1915-62 (Weaver 1986; Amy 1993, 1996, 2002).
Seeing potential for a more fluid two-party system, scholars like Drutman (2016) and Lijphart (2015) argue STV would lessen polarization. By
opening government to major-party outsiders, STV would reduce legislative
cohesion, allow coalitions to shift, and generate policy more reflective of society’s underlying diversity. An earlier generation of advocates made virtually
identical arguments (Hoag and Hallett 1926; Hallett 1937).
The last time Americans used STV, however, advocates contended withsustained scholarly resistance. Much of it came from Hermens (1940, 1941,
1943, 1984), who lectured widely on “the breaking-up of parties.” Following
STV’s repeal in every city but Cambridge, Banfield and Wilson (1966: 97)
proclaimed that “PR breaks down party control over nominations and permits mavericks who owe nothing to party leaders to win office.” This paper
returns to two of their three cases – Cincinnati and Worcester (MA) – to see
if quantitative data support their anecdotal claim.2
I argue that parties in STV elections face a tradeoff between winning andcohesion. Because popular candidates can run and win on their own, parties
have to choose whether to try to co-opt them. Putting resources behindthose candidates can yield more seats in an assembly. The price, however,can be lower caucus discipline.
1. Cambridge has used STV to elect its city council and school committee since 1941.
Minneapolis voters in 2006 approved STV for Park and Recreation Board elections.
2. Banfield and Wilson drew exclusively on two qualitative-descriptive accounts by Banfield’s own Joint Center for Urban Studies (Harvard/Massachusetts Institute of Technology): one on Cincinnati (Gray 1959) and one on Worcester (Binstock 1960).

2

My data are indices of party cohesion measured at the ends of legislative
terms, then logically derived measures of electoral coordination preceding
each of those terms. I focus on electoral coordination because, if a party’s
candidates campaign as a team, we might expect them to govern as one. All
the data come from previously paper-bound roll-call and electoral records.
They cover 20 elections, 20 council terms, 688 candidacies, and 180 victors(including party and party-factional affiliations in non-partisan elections).
This research design does not let me say whether party discipline is guaranteed to be lower with STV – for instance, by comparing otherwise similar
cities with and without that rule. Collection of the data one would needhas only just begun (Austin 2002; Bucchianeri 2017; Burnett 2017). What
I can show are endorsement dilemmas and levels of party coordination thatprecede lower or higher cohesion in government. The findings are consistent
with literature on how nominations condition electoral rules’ effect on party
cohesion.
Finally, I contribute to a new debate about the merits of ranked-choicevoting (RCV). One branch of this work covers voter error, voter turnout,and ballot roll-off in single-winner RCV elections (Neely et al. 2005; Neely
and Cook 2008; Schultz and Rendahl 2010; Burnett and Kogan 2015; Neely
and McDaniel 2015; McDaniel 2016; Kimball and Anthony 2016). A second
emerging area focuses on voters’ (Tolbert 2014; Donovan et al. 2016) andcandidates’ (Donovan 2014) perceptions of campaign tone in both singleand multi-winner (i.e., Cambridge) races.3 This is the first paper to consider
American legislative politics under RCV of either type. While STV does notcause low party discipline, it does not guard against it. Understanding whythat is allows us to modify the rule if we deem party discipline important.
First I explain how STV works. Then I review literature on electoral systems and party discipline. Section three illustrates the variation in my sample. Section four states and tests hypotheses about the relationship between
electoral coordination and party cohesion under STV. Section five turns tomotive. I show that low-cohesion parties were those that needed more seats,tended to endorse people who might have won as independents, and tended
to reflect less campaign “team spirit” as a result. The final section addresses
limits in the application of these findings, then how one might change STV
if one wanted higher cohesion.
3. See also Kimball and Anthony (2018).

3

Basic mechanics of STV
Under STV, the voter ranks candidates in order of preference. The numberof votes needed to win one seat depends on the size of a district. In a districtof three seats, which is the minimum proposed in Beyer’s bill, a candidate
would need 25 percent of votes plus one to win.4 Votes in excess of that 25
percent are “surplus” and transfer to whomever that candidates’ supporters
have ranked next. Similarly, candidates not clearing that 25 percent are
eliminated one at a time, and their votes pass on to whomever is ranked
next on the ballots cast for them. The vote count iterates between surplus
transfer and sequential elimination until all seats are filled.

Electoral rules affect cohesion via nomination
I argue that STV causes low party discipline when seat-maximizing parties
nominate candidates apt to challenge their parties’ positions. How is this argument consistent with existing scholarship on comparative party discipline?
Parties aim for control of government in order to deliver policy, and those
two goals can conflict (Schwartz 1989; Aldrich 1995). In the presidencycentered narrative of Bawn et al. (2012), interest groups paper over theirdifferences in order to elect a chosen candidate. Inaction on points of disagreement is a source of disunity, and it causes realignment in the long term(Miller and Schofield 2003; Karol 2009). Bergman and Shugart (2013) reasonfrom the same basic position in their comparative work on legislative elections. Focusing on low-threshold, candidate-based electoral systems, theynote that the interests of “vote-seeking candidates” can be more or lessaligned with the needs of “collective seat-maximizing parties.” Generally
speaking, there is a tradeoff between winning elections and delivering every
member’s favorite policy.
Do electoral systems affect the tradeoff? One research tradition implies
they do not. Some of this work has focused on Brazil, a presidential system
in which legislators are elected under open-list proportional representation
4. A Droop quota (Q) is a function of the sum of valid first-preference votes cast in anelection (V ) and district magnitude (M ):
Q=

V
+1
M +1

4

(1)

(PR). For example, Limongi and Figueiredo (1995: 500) saw that Rice cohesion scores varied, and they explained that variation in terms of chamber
leaders’ ability to prevent caucus-splitting bills from coming to a vote. Ames
(2001: 187-223) looked at the same legislature and saw that party unity scores
were higher when parties could agree internally on geographically targeted
spending packages. In a similar vein, Tavits (2009) compares five European
parliamentary democracies because these should have higher party discipline
than presidential systems. The rules in her five cases range from not-at-all
to highly candidate-centered. She finds that politicians with local politicalexperience are more likely to defect from majorities of their parliamentary
parties, regardless of institutions.
U.S. Congress scholars might note that discipline has varied while voting rules have not. Congressional elections always have been candidatebased and, since 1842, overwhelmingly in single-member districts (Calabrese
2006).5 Compared to present levels, however, party discipline in the 1960s80s was low. This is true across a range of metrics: average Rice cohesion
scores, NOMINATE-based measures of polarization, agenda-corrected measures of the proportion of party-unity votes by Congress, partisan division
on votes to empower chamber leaders, floor-speech rhetoric, fundraising coordination, and so on (Mayhew 1974; Cain et al. 1987; Poole and Rosenthal
1997; Crespin et al. 2011; Pearson 2015).
Once we introduce variation on electoral systems, however, mixed results
emerge. Desposato (2006) finds that adjusted Rice cohesion scores weresimilar in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and Senate, 1991-2003, theelectoral systems of which are different. Two studies of the Russian Dumafound higher defection rates among deputies elected in single-member districts (SMD) than their co-partisans elected from closed PR lists (Haspel
et al. 1998; Kunicova and Remington 2008). Jun and Hix (2010) find similar
behavior in the 17th Korean National Assembly, following a change to mixed
SMD/list-PR elections.6 Olivella and Tavits (2013) find that defection rates
increased in the Hungarian parliament, 1994-2010, following a move fromclosed-list PR to SMD elections. At the same time, cohesion did not increase
with the move back. Finally, Carey (2007) finds lower party cohesion among
Western democracies whose rules permit intra-party competition.
5. Rare deviations from single-member plurality include at-large plurality, or the “general ticket,” and the numbered post system.
6. Consistent with the argument in this paper, Jun and Hix (2010: 158-9) attributeparties’ tolerance of defection to their desire to maximize seat shares.

5More recent work argues that effects of electoral systems depend on whatever nomination rules come with. For example, committees in 24 U.S. states’
lower chambers, 1955-95, had more autonomy from partisan majorities whenthose states held open primaries (Bagashka and Clark 2014). Alvarez and
Sinclair (2012) find that California legislators, 1975-2006, voted more oftenwith members of the opposing caucus when those legislators were nominatedin blanket primaries. Yael Shomer has a series of cross-national analyses
showing how party discipline suffers especially in candidate-based systems
with permissive nominating rules, e.g., when primary voters choose nominees
instead of party leaders (Shomer 2017, 2016). Finally, one can find defection
even under closed-list systems, especially among people who appear higher
on party lists (Stegmaier et al. 2016). Why would that be? Legislators withlower list positions need the party to get elected – but the party may needlist-topping “mavericks” to boost its overall vote share.
What about STV and party discipline? The effect likely also depends
on the sorts of people nominated. Carey and Shugart (1995) noted early onthat “open-endorsement” STV (i.e., with nomination by petition) would freeaspiring legislators to run on non-party platforms. Qualitative accounts of
STV in the United States were based on open-endorsement STV. Polemic
aside, proponents and detractors agreed it would not (and eventually didnot) promote party discipline (Hoag 1923; Hoag and Hallett 1926; Hermens
1941, 1943; Banfield and Wilson 1966).
Outside the United States, STV comes with many tools of nomination
control. In Malta, for example, party organizations can refuse to nominate
candidates, and candidates on ballots are grouped by party (Hirczy de Miñoand Lane 1996). Australia gives voters the option to ratify party-given preference orderings in Senate elections. The vast majority take it, which effectively turns STV into closed-list PR. Ticket-splitting is therefore rare in bothcountries (Farrell and Katz 2014: 15). Finally, in Ireland, no person may bea candidate without a Certificate of Party Affiliation, and no person may
receive such a certificate without signatures from one or more party officers(Citizens’ Information Board 2017a, 2017b).
Perhaps as a result of such party control, few remark on poor cohesionin STV countries. Owens’ (2003) survey of advanced industrial democracies
makes no mention of problems in the Australian Senate. Scholars hold up
Malta’s party system as one that defies conventional STV wisdom (Hirczyde Miño and Lane 1996, 2000). Sinnott (1999: 117) reports high rates of
discipline in Ireland, and Depauw and Martin (2009) note these are among6the highest in Western Europe.

Historic context and dependent variable
I begin with a description of the data and the context that produced it.
Twenty-four American cities adopted open-endorsement STV in the first halfof the 20th century. Twenty-three of these instances came with councilmanager city charters. This is because the Proportional Representation
League, which had unsuccessfully promoted PR since 1893, appealed to the
National Municipal League (NML) in 1913 with a new “representative council plan” for city government (Thompson 1913; Hoag 1914). This became
the NML’s model city charter from 1914-64: council-manager government,
at-large elections to councils of seven or nine, nomination by petition, andSTV elections (Frederickson et al. 2004). Ashtabula (OH) became a test casefor that charter in 1915 (Hatton 1916; Busch 1995).
The cohesion problem noted by later STV critics soon appeared in Ashtabula. Proponents said its council was more representative than those of nearby
cities with similar, non-STV charters (Moley 1918). Detractors noted it took
more than fifty ballots to choose the city manager (Hermens 1941: 366). An
early Master’s thesis described several simultaneous cleavages – over prohibition, ethnic identification, and the Ku Klux Klan – but did not say whether
they overlapped or cross-cut each other (Bloomfield 1926).
To solve the apparent discipline issue, reformers began promoting theidea of pre-election coalition (Hoag and Hallett 1932). They recommended
merging those groups that had backed STV in the first place, presenting acommon slate, and asking voters to rank only members of that slate. The
most prominent example of this device appeared in Cincinnati, where a coalition of regular Democrats and Progressive Republicans imposed STV in 1924
(Kolesar 1995). The NML appealed widely to the success of this “Cincinnati
experiment” in an effort to export the model to 17 more cities nationwide(Taft 1971).
This paper focuses on Cincinnati and Worcester for several reasons. First
among them is their place in the STV historiography. Banfield and Wilson(1966) generalized about the discipline problem on the basis of experience in
only these two cities, plus New York City, which had an entirely different sortof city charter.7 Second, institutions in these cities were both identical and
7. New York retained a strong mayor and bicameral structure. STV was used for lower-

7

representative of the wider STV universe: city-wide elections to nine-seat,
unicameral councils. Third, these cities were among those with the longest
uses of STV, which means they provide much over-time variation to explain.
Fourth, they tap the U.S. experience with STV, which clustered in threestates: five cities in Ohio, seven in Massachusetts, and three in New York.8
The party systems were as follows. In Cincinnati, Progressive Republicans were in tense coalition with the regular Democratic Party, jointly opposing the regular Republican party (Reed et al. 1957). That coalition was called
the Charter Party. Worcester offered a reverse image of Cincinnati’s arrangement. The Citizens’ Plan E Association (CEA) pitted reformist Democrats
and the Republican Party against the regular Democratic Party (Binstock1960).9
Figures 1 and 2 let us visualize these party systems. I have applied a twodimensional, non-parametric, spatial model to the roll-call voting records ofeach city. This optimal classification (OC) method generates coordinates thatmaximize correct prediction of voting decisions, as its name implies (Poole
2000, 2005). For each city, I combine all sessions into a single voting matrix.10
Because we are interested in party cohesion, I have estimated these ideal
points with what Rosenthal and Voeten (2004) call a “party-switcher model.”This means treating legislators who switch parties as different people.11
chamber elections. The size of the council fluctuated with voter turnout, and seats wereapportioned at the borough level (Tanzer 1937).
8. Analysis of the New York City records is in progress.
9. Plan E associations were common across the Massachusetts cities except Cambridge,
where the coalition was known as the Cambridge Civic Association, or CCA. Plan E was
the state-law designation for a council-manager STV charter.
10. In each case, I have set the polarity of the first dimension with a long-serving memberof the largest regular party (Democrat James D. O’Brien in Worcester, Republican James
G. Stewart in Cincinnati) and that of the second dimension with a long-serving member ofthe faction that defected from it (reformist Democrat Thomas C. Sweeney in Worcester,
Progressive Republican Russell Wilson in Cincinnati).
11. The data comprise 20 elections, 20 council terms, 688 candidacies, and 180 victors.
Cincinnati roll-call votes are from The City Bulletin: Official Publication of the City ofCincinnati. Worcester roll calls are photographed and entered from original minutes,
on file at Worcester City Hall. Party affiliation data for Cincinnati come from Resultsof Elections in Hamilton County, supplemented by biennial, pre-election issues of theCincinnati Enquirer. Party data for Worcester are from biennial, pre-election issues of theWorcester Telegram, CEA endorsement records from the Worcester Historical Museum,and voter registration index cards on file at the Worcester Election Commission. All
photographs are on file with the author.

8

Council of the City of Cincinnati, 1930−57

Progressive
reformers

RoseCR
WilsonR
CR
Imbus
D
Clark
D

Kelly
R

BachrachR

DunlapD
BigelowP

CashD
WilsonJBerryD
CR

PollakCR

Labor/New Deal

McClain
R

Taft
CR

Adams
R

Gilligan
DolbeyBeckman
DCR
D

Mid-20thliberals

Patterson
R

YeatmanGusweiler Toms
Weber
RR
R
Craig
R
P

Waldvogel
Reid
EverettProctor
CRD
CR
D

Berry
D

DruffelD

GradisonR
StewartJR

Post-war
R majority
ClancyR
SchererStewartP
R
Leis
R
Allen
R
R
Rich
R

Locker Craig
R
R

Pre-war Molloy Klein
RR
R majority

JordanD
Hall
R

WoesteR

R machine
remnant

95.9% of votes correctly classified.
APRE = 0.851.

Figure 1: Spatial representation of voting in the Council of the City of Cincinnati, 1930-57. CR=Charter Republican, D=Democrat (part of Charter),
P=Progressive Democrat, R=regular Republican.

9Worcester City Council, 1950−60

Katz
CD

LawlessD

Rising MA
Dems

Soulliere
CU
Favulli
D

Shea
D

Katz
D

Burrows
D

Marshall
Democratic CD
Tivnanreformers
D
SweeneyDuffy
D machine Tomaiolo
CD
O'BrienJD
R
D
remnant
D
RousseauR
Captains ofO'BrienJD
FavulliHolmstrom Morgan industry
CD
CD
R
R
PaysonCasdin
MullaneyR
CD
CD
Late-1950s
CEA LaneR
Wells
D

94.7% of votes correctly classified.
APRE = 0.799.

Figure 2: Spatial representation of voting in the Worcester City Council,
1950-60. CD=CEA Democrat, CU=CEA unaffiliated, D=regular Democrat,
R=Republican (part of CEA).

10

Two key points stand out in each plot. The first is an overall division
between the coalition elements (Charter, CEA) and the regular, opposing
parties. The diagonal lines running from top-right to bottom-left help us see
this. For Cincinnati, only one person appears on the wrong side of this line:
Charter Democrat Albert C. Jordan, a local union boss who began votingwith Republicans after Progressive Republicans broke ranks with the rest ofCharter on pro-labor legislation in the mid-1950s.12
We see the same overall division in Worcester, where just four people
appear on the wrong side of the line. One is Israel “Izzy” Katz, a CEA
Democrat who eventually joined the regular Democratic party and, laterin the 1970s, became Mayor of Worcester. The second is Paul Soulliere,an unaffiliated CEA endorsee about whom we know very little. Regular
Democrats on the CEA side of the line are Alan K. Burrows, also a mystery,and James D. O’Brien. O’Brien made a successful transition from memberof the pre-reform “machine” to CEA-endorsed mayor in the late 1950s. Hisalignment with CEA Democrats toward the right of the space may reflect
his courting of that group. In November 1957, O’Brien replaced Thomas C.
Sweeney as leader of the Democrats aligned with CEA.13
The second point to note is varied party discipline. We see distinct voting
blocs on either side of the line in each plot, but the blocs on any given side
do not form one coherent mass. I think this patterning represents a series ofongoing, local-level realignments.14 Consider any voting bloc and the groupdirectly opposite.
In Cincinnati, Progressive Reformers of the late 1920s-early 1930s (top)oppose whatever remained of the pre-reform Republican Party (bottom).
Some of those Republicans go on to serve in the Republican majority of thelate-1930s and early 1940s (lower right), which itself is opposite a group of
New Deal Democrats and labor-aligned reform Republicans (left). Later on,
we see a group of primarily racial liberals opposing the 1950s Republican
party (Heisel 1982), which includes conservatives like I-know-it-when-I-see-it
Potter Stewart, eventual Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, anda group of eventual U.S. Representatives: anti-Communist crusader Gordon Scherer, Goldwater acolyte William Cody Kelly, and Donald D. Clancy
12. The author, unpublished.
13. The author, unpublished.
14. Hans Noel (2016) finds a similar spatial structure in ideal points from the U.S. Houseof Representatives, 1940-80, with two orthogonal cleavages: Republican versus Democrat,then liberal versus conservative.

11

(Straetz 1958).
Worcester’s policy space reflects similar variation. Early CEA Democrats(right) are opposite the Democratic “machine” remnant (left), which also
opposes the regular Republicans (lower right). Regular Republicans standbetween the first- and second-generation CEA blocs, the latter of which (bottom) opposes three regular Democrats who went on to successful careers instate politics (top): Mike Favulli, Izzy Katz, and John Lawless (Binstock1960).
One might be tempted to say the main line of cleavage rotates through a
two-dimensional ideological space. Alas, the titles of the bills make it difficult
to say what the x- and y-axes substantively represent. I reserve that job forlater work.
How do the ideal point estimates compare to those from cities without
STV? Peter Bucchianeri (2017) has the only other multi-city set of local-levelroll-call data to date.15 While he does not yet have the party affiliation dataneeded to calculate cohesion indices, he reports the fit of one-dimensional
OC models applied to multi-term voting matrices (as I have done here) from
132 modern city councils. Fit is the aggregate proportional reduction in error(APRE), which controls for the margins of roll-call votes when reporting how
well a model classifies voting choices. Bucchianeri says the mean APRE for a
one-dimensional model is 0.74, with a range of 0.47 to 1, and a standard deviation of 0.12. APRE for a one-dimensional OC model is 0.73 in Cincinnati
and 0.55 in Worcester. Treating APRE as a rough proxy for voting cohesion,
Cincinnati under STV is on par with the modern average, and Worcester
registers toward the bottom of the range.
Figure 3 gives a different picture of party cohesion in each city – and themeasure I will use in my analyses below. These are Rice (1925) cohesion
scores, a standard way to measure party loyalty. Scores are averaged acrossall roll-call votes in a given term for a given party. Unanimous roll calls areomitted. We see that cohesion varies between about 0.4 and one 16
15. Burnett (2017) has data from San Diego, 2008-9. Austin (2002) once had data from
Alexandria (VA), Huntsville (AL), Raleigh (NC), Rochester, New York, and New Haven,
1987-96.
16. The Rice score (R) for a single roll call in which party p casts Y yea votes and N
nay votes is:Rp =|Yp − Np |Yp + Np

12(2)

Cincinnati
1.0

Mean Rice cohesion

0.9

P

CR
D

0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4

R
1931

1933

1935

1937

1939

1941

1943

1945

1947

1949

1951

1953

1955

1957

CR=Charter Republican, D=Democratic, R=Republican, P=Progressive Democratic.

Worcester
1.0

CU

Mean Rice cohesion

0.9
0.8

R
CD

0.7
0.6

D

0.5
0.4
1951

1953

1955

1957

1959

CD=CEA Democratic, CU=CEA unaffiliated, D=Democratic, R=Republican.

Figure 3: Party cohesion under STV in both cities.

13

1961

Campaign as a team, govern as a teamThe literature tells us that electoral systems affect legislative cohesion via
nominations. It also tells us that list systems sometimes produce low-cohesion
groupings, even those with high nomination barriers like closed-list PR. The
reason is that parties want to win control of government as well as stand forpolicy. That leads them to nominate popular candidates whose votes help
elect the rest of a slate, even if those candidates divide their parties some of
the time. I hypothesize that open-endorsement STV worked the same way.
When a party needed more votes, it endorsed people who were apt to divide
the caucus.
My first step is to show how varying “team spirit” in STV elections preceded different levels of party cohesion. This requires a sense of what constitutes a normal vote distribution among candidates, then what a distribution
might look like when a seat-seeking party gropes for extra votes. First I
consider those distributions under a normal STV election. Then I consider
them in light of a quirk in council-manager cities: the election doubled as atest of who might be elected chamber leader.

Strategic coordination in normal STV
A seat-maximizing, STV party has two overarching worries. One is not tonominate too many candidates, but it is hard for a party to know what
constitutes “too many.” The second is to make sure that first-preference
votes are spread evenly among the candidates it does nominate. That it
can control. Assume that a party has nominated the optimal number ofcandidates, i.e., it has a good sense of its strength in the electorate. By
definition, only one candidate can win in the first round of counting. The
trick is to make sure each of those candidates survives elimination for as longas possible in an STV vote count. That way, they can garner additional
votes as the count proceeds, either from other parties or from co-partisans
who end up eliminated.
How does a party make sure its slate members survive elimination for as
long as possible? A party cannot control what other parties have done, but it
can manage its own vote. One way is to prevent same-party candidates from“spoiling” each other, i.e., causing early-round elimination by concentrating
too many votes on too few candidates. The easiest way to do this is to makesure each candidate gets roughly the same share of first-preference votes (Cox141997: 144). In the comparative literature, this “vote management” strategy
is known as “spread the preferences” (Clark 2012).
It would be easy to check whether a party’s candidates have gone alongwith a preference-spreading strategy. One potential measure would be thegap between the actual and effective numbers of seat-winning candidates,computing the effective number from their proportions of their combined
first-round vote. An absolute gap far from zero would indicate failure ofelectoral coordination, i.e., a failure to spread the preferences.

Strategic coordination under the STV city charter
STV as used in Cincinnati, Worcester, and elsewhere complicates the measurement of coordination. This is because candidates might be running formayor at the same time they were running for office. It was convention toaward the mayoralty to the highest-placed candidate from the majority. In
the case of a coalition such as Charter or CEA, the mayoralty would go to
the highest-placed candidate from whichever coalition party won more seats(Straetz 1958). It follows that a vote distribution preceding a term withhigher than average party discipline ought to have one clear leader and fairly
even vote shares for all other candidates.
Visually speaking, it is easy to see successful “city STV” coordination in
printed election returns. Table 1 gives an example from Cincinnati, November 1953. Carl Rich was the Republican Party’s candidate for mayor. His
first-preference vote total is more than double that of any other Republican
candidate. At the same time, the other Republicans have fairly even voteshares, indicating they spread their preferences.
Table 1 also contains an example of coordination failure. Focus on the
Democrats. There are two potential party leaders. One is Ted Berry, President of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The second is long-time Mayor Ed Waldvogel, a New Deal
Democrat who selectively worked with Republicans on urban redevelopmentin the 1940s. Redevelopment later put Berry and Waldvogel in conflict (Gray
1959: V-5). When the two entered council that December, in fact, the Charter coalition broke tradition by electing Waldvogel mayor. Berry had 1,153
more first-preference votes than Waldvogel.

15

Candidate
Rich
Kelly
ClancyBachrach
DolbeyBerry
WaldvogelJordanGilligan

Party Round 1
R
25,062
R
11,643
R
10,037
R
7,683
CR
6,843
D
14,831
D
13,678D
10,290D
8,085% of quota
158
73
63
48
43
93
86
65
51

Table 1: Winners of the 1953 Cincinnati election (R=Republican,
D=Democrat, CR=Charter Republican).

Two measures of coordination in elections
We can capture the difference between good and bad coordination – e.g.,
between the Republicans and Democrats in Cincinnati’s 1953 election – with
two straightforward measures. The first is a concentration index of a party’s
winning candidates’ vote shares.17 Assume a party with an arbitrary numberof “minions,” a party leader running for mayor, and a potential challenger.
Assume the minions spread their preferences so that their vote shares are thesame. Vote-share concentration will be higher when there is only one ticket
leader. It will fall as a potential challenger approaches the vote share of theticket leader.
There are two potential problems with the concentration index. The firstis that, after some inflection point, it again begins increasing as the challenger’s vote share approaches that of the party leader. This inflection point
varies with raw votes for a minion as well as the raw votes for a leader. The
second problem is that concentration varies systematically with the numberof candidates included in the calculation. I propose two ways to deal withthese issues.
To address systematic variation with the number of candidates, I computea correction to vote concentration for a party of each size in the data. Thisvalue is the coefficient from a linear regression of the concentration index on
party size alone. The idea here is to partial out whatever contribution party
17. Concentration is equal to the sum of squared vote proportions (Hirschman 1964).

16

size makes, then subtract it from the observed value of vote concentration.
Table 2 reports these values, using a party of two as reference category.
As expected, each coefficient is very precisely estimated, and as party size
increases, so does the size of the correction required.
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)Intercept
0.55
0.02
30.93
0.00
3 winners
-0.14
0.03
-5.48
0.00
4 winners
-0.27
0.03
-9.96
0.00
5 winners
-0.32
0.04
-7.47
0.00
Table 2: Using linear regression to partial out the effect of party size on theconcentration index of winners’ vote shares.
There is no clear way to correct the index for systematic effects of leader
and minion vote-share sizes. Instead, I propose a second measure: the gap
between leader and challenger vote shares. Technically speaking, this is thedifference between the vote shares of the highest-placed candidate and runner up, with vote share calculated as proportion of the ticket leaders’ combined share. If the challenger is really being a minion by going along withpreference-spreading, the gap will be large.
Neither measure is perfect, but together they get at the relationship between coordination in elections and cohesion in a legislature. The concentration index captures slate-wide coordination but breaks down under someconfigurations of leaders and minions. The gap between the slate’s leading candidates is robust to that problem but does not capture preferencespreading in the rest of the slate.

Statistical tests
I hypothesize that party coordination in elections ought to help predict thesubsequent levels of legislative cohesion. Operationally, average Rice cohesionin a given legislative term should be higher when the preceding election
reflects:
1. higher values of the size-adjusted concentration index of a party’s
winners’ vote shares,
2. higher values of the gap between a party’s top two winners.
17

To test these two hypotheses, I estimate a battery of linear regression
models, sequentially adding controls. My observations are party-terms. Following Carey (2007) and others, I omit the occasional party of one member.
The first and most important control is party size. This is because Ricecohesion scores systematically inflate cohesion in small parties (Desposato
2005).
I also control for whether the party filled a vacancy over the course ofa term. This may be a non-electoral shock to party discipline. Convention
allowed a party to choose a member’s replacement in the event of death orresignation. Narrative evidence suggests the Republican Party in Cincinnati
used this power to increase caucus discipline (Straetz 1958). Finally, I add adummy variable for Worcester, then replace it with fixed effects for cityterm.
Table 3 presents the results of all ten models. In each of the first five,higher values of adjusted vote-share concentration predict higher values of
average Rice cohesion. In each of the last five, smaller gaps between the top
two candidates (i.e., the “leader” and the “challenger”) predict lower valuesof average Rice cohesion.
As expected, the vote-share concentration models better fit the data.
That is because concentration captures the entire slate’s behavior, while the
top-two gap only focuses on the top two candidates. R-squared is better foreach of these models than the corresponding gap model.18 The coefficients are
more precisely estimated. The intercepts are smaller, have less explanatory
power, and tend to hover around the average Rice values implied in Figure 3.
Finally, adding the concentration coefficient to the intercept always produces
average Rice cohesion within the range of possible values.
Figure 4 illustrates the relationship between party cohesion and coordination in the preceding election. Filled points are from Worcester, and hollow
points are Cincinnati parties. Dashed lines represent the predicted values
and 95-percent confidence interval of the concentration model with controls
for party size and whether a vacancy was filled (both held at their sample
means). As coordination improves, so does legislative discipline.
18. Adjusted R-squared does plummet when we add fixed effects for city-term. This isbecause fixed effects amount to 19 extra variables in a model with 56 observations.

18

1.0

Prediction and 95% CI
Cincinnati parties
Worcester parties

●
●

●
●

●
●

●

●
●
●

0.9
Party cohesion (average Rice score)

●

●

●●

●

●
●

0.8

●
●

●

●

●

●

●
●
●

●

●

●

●

●

●
●
●

●

●

●

●

0.7

●

●

●

●
●

●

●

●

●

●

0.6
●
●

●

0.5

●

●

●

●

●
●

0.4

●

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

Electoral coordination (adjusted vote concentration)

Figure 4: Relationship between legislative cohesion and successful coordination in the preceding election.

19

20

∗∗∗ p < 0.001, ∗∗ p < 0.01, ∗ p < 0.05

R2
Adj. R2
Num. obs.
RMSE

Gap between top two

Worcester dummy

VacancyIntercept

0.18
0.17
56
0.14

Naive
0.67∗∗∗(0.03)
Adj. vote concentration 0.26∗∗(0.07)
Party size

0.29
0.26
56
0.13

Size
0.34∗∗(0.12)
0.57∗∗∗(0.13)
0.08∗∗(0.03)

0.29
0.25
56
0.13

Vacancy
0.40∗(0.18)
0.51∗∗(0.17)
0.06(0.04)
0.04(0.07)

0.31
0.25
56
0.13

0.37
-0.05
56
0.15

City City-term
0.40∗
0.36
(0.18)(0.24)
0.54∗∗
0.63∗∗(0.17)(0.23)
0.06
0.08(0.04)(0.06)
0.02−0.03(0.08)(0.11)−0.04(0.04)
0.20∗(0.09)
0.08
0.07
56
0.14

Naive
0.70∗∗∗(0.03)

0.19∗(0.09)
0.24
0.19
56
0.13

−0.06∗∗(0.02)
0.17∗∗(0.06)−0.06(0.04)
0.22∗(0.09)
0.26
0.20
56
0.13

−0.05∗∗(0.02)
0.18∗∗(0.06)−0.02(0.02)

0.19∗(0.09)
0.11
0.07
56
0.14

City
0.87∗∗∗(0.07)

Vacancy
0.85∗∗∗(0.07)

Size
0.77∗∗∗(0.06)

Table 3: OLS models of average Rice cohesion.

0.24∗(0.12)
0.32
-0.14
56
0.16

−0.06∗(0.03)
0.16(0.08)

City-term
0.90∗∗∗(0.12)

Groping for votes to win more seats
The last section showed that terms with lower than average cohesion tended
to follow elections in which parties did not campaign as teams. I argued thata party campaigns as a team when it spreads its preferences to maximize theelection of its candidates, so that the winners’ vote shares are roughly even(accounting for the mayoral quirk in my cases). Candidates who care more
about themselves than their parties are maximizing first-choice votes. Callthis sort of candidate a “lone wolf.”
Parties nominate lone wolves when they need the surplus votes in order
to win more seats. As long as the lone wolf instructs their voters to rank
within the rest of the slate, any transfer of surplus from the lone wolf will
help elect co-partisans.
To show that seat-needing parties nominate lone wolves, I ask three questions about the parties in the bottom third of my Rice cohesion distribution.19
Was the party in the minority at the time of the election that produced therespective council? If so, it ought to have been groping for seats. If it wasin a coalition, was it in the minority of that coalition? A party in a coalition’s minority will grope. That is because it wants to be the majority ofthe majority, in order to win the mayoralty. Third, was there a detectable
turn toward popular out-of-party candidates at the election preceding a lowcohesion term?
On average, parties needing more seats to dominate the council and/or a
pre-election coalition were those that had the lowest cohesion levels. Table
4 presents the set. Of 18 parties, 12 of these were in the minority at thepreceding election.20 Three more had been in the minority of a pre-election
coalition.21
19. Size-induced bias in cohesion scores is not producing this subset. We see parties ofevery size existing in the sample. See Table 4.
20. I omit the 1950-1 term in Worcester because parties there did not yet have an STVelectoral history to consult.
21. Special circumstances explain the remaining three terms. Low-cohesion Cincinnati
Republicans in 1938-9 and 1940-1 had endorsed a labor lawyer, Nick Klein, in both ofthe preceding elections (Straetz 1958). This is because, in both elections preceding those,
no one party or coalition had control of council. The Progressive Democratic ticket was
fielding its own candidates and, for whatever reason, not making pre-election deals witheither Charter or the Republicans (Kolesar 1995). Low cohesion among the Cincinnati
Democrats of 1950-1 appears unrelated to endorsements. Note, however, that NAACP
leader Ted Berry (referenced above) switched in this term from the Charter Republicans

21

Might the candidates endorsed have won in their own right? That is, can
we really call them “lone wolves”? One place to find a lone wolf is in theset who lost the last election. Figure 5 gives a quick look at the data. Bars
represent the proportion of winners who had lost the last election for the top
and bottom thirds of the cohesion range. Parties in the bottom third of thecohesion range nominated last-election losers twice as often as parties in the
top third.
Figure 5 does not speak to candidates recruited from other parties, nor
who did not run in the previous election. To get a better sense of candidates’
independent popularity, we can look at the backgrounds of the candidates
themselves. The rightmost column of Table 4 describes whatever council
member was new to the party for the respective term. Before looking at thosedescriptions, note three historic accounts of endorsement politics in Cincinnati and Worcester. Burnham (1997) argues that the post-reform Cincinnati
GOP initially refused to nominate black candidates. This refusal provoked an
independent candidacy in 1927. Beginning in 1929 and continuing through1951, the GOP thereafter endorsed one black candidate in each election.
In 1943, Charter’s component parties felt similar pressure to begin slating
women (Burnham 2013: 58).22 Finally, our best description of Worcester city
politics notes competition among Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, andJews (Binstock 1960: 2.34-35, 3.5-6, 6.15).
Space constraints prevent extended discussion of the lone wolves, but Ricescores recover the historical literature’s insights. The Cincinnati GOP begins endorsing black candidates during its post-reform nadir. Then it turns
to labor figures in the mid-New Deal, when elections are returning hungcouncils in the presence of a third-party challenge (Kolesar 1995). Charter
Republicans turn to women in the middle of World War II. The Democrats
then bid for support of black Republicans. Around the same time, Republicans nominate a prominent county prosecutor. In Worcester, the contending
Democratic factions – the regular party, plus the CEA Democrats who brokewith it – compete for the allegiance of Jews and Italian-Americans as dictatedby their seat-maximization needs.
to the Democratic Party. See, e.g., Brady Black, “Significant Points Abound in City
Election; If Republicans Elect Five, Who’ll They Be?,” Cincinnati Enquirer, November 3,
1953.
22. Other descriptions of Cincinnati lone wolves are drawn from Straetz (1958).

22

Proportion of winners who lost the last election

0.12

0.10

0.08

0.06

0.04

0.02

0.00

Least cohesive
third

Most cohesivethirdLevel of party's unity
N of winners for low quantile: 41. High quantile: 33.

Figure 5: Endorsement of last-election losers by parties in the bottom and
top thirds of the Rice cohesion distribution.

23

Implications
I have shown that legislative cohesion under historic STV elections could behigh, low, or in between. It was high when parties campaigned as teams
and low when candidates put themselves ahead of party. Parties nonethelessendorsed such candidates when minority status (in council or a pre-election
coalition) made that strategy worthwhile. In sum, historic STV elections
suggest a strategic context in which majority-seeking parties reach beyond
their traditional bases of support. There was a tradeoff between winningelections and cohesion in government.
The winning-cohesion tradeoff ought to exist today if we were to apply
STV once again. We would not see a second layer of competition for control of the mayoralty, unless that city (or state) operated under a template
council-manager system. We would measure party-oriented electoral coordination differently as a result. Overall, though, parties still aim for legislative
majorities. That would be true under the Beyer bill as well. Parties inCongressional elections target marginal seats. Under RCV, we might expect
them to target competitive multi-seat districts or even the most marginal seatin any given district. And the winning-cohesion tradeoff would hold to theextent that winning the marginal seat required tapping new constituencies,
co-opting opposing-party “centrists,” or reaching out to unaffiliated candidates whose bases of support were growing.
One way to raise legislative cohesion in that context would be to do what
Ireland does: deny ballot access to people without permission from party officers. That raises questions of its own. If a “lone wolf” candidate is popular
enough to induce major-party endorsement, what is to stop them from forming their own party? In the late 1930s, Cincinnati hosted a popular left-wing
party that did not join (or was not invited to join) the Charter pre-election
coalition. These Progressive Democrats held the council balance until the
GOP absorbed them in 1941 (Straetz 1958: 129-34). Black candidates reflect
a similar story: shunned in 1927 and 1929, then incorporated in 1931. In
Worcester, competition for votes eventually brought Jews into the regular
Democratic Party.
It appears that ranked-choice voting makes parties work a little harder.
Whether that is good or bad depends on the value we give party discipline.

24

25
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes

Minority at t − 2
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes*
No*
No*
Yes*
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
-

Min. of coal. at t − 2
No
No
No
Yes
Yes**
No
Yes
No
Jew ran each election
Italian-American
No detectable change
Jew (same)
Italian-American

Endorsed at t − 2
Independent winner from 1927
Black refused endorsement 1929
New slate (Gradison, Stewart)
Black doctor
Labor lawyer
Labor lawyer
No detectable change
Woman
County prosecutor
No detectable changeBlack party switcher
One liberal; one USWA boss
No detectable change

Table 4: Parties in the low-cohesion third of the sample. Status in council refers to conditions at the election
producing the term whose end year is shown. A double asterisk denotes a pre-election coalition comprisingequally sized partners (i.e., no clear majority). One asterisk denotes a 4-4-1 council in spite of pre-election
coalition. A dash means the party was not in a coalition, pre- nor post-election. A blank entry means there
had not yet been an STV election. CD=CEA Democrat (Worcester). CR=Charter Republican (Cincinnati).
USWA=United Steelworkers of America, an affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

City
Term end t Party Size
Cincinnati
1931
R
3
Cincinnati
1933
R
4
Cincinnati
1935
R
4
Cincinnati
1937
R
4
Cincinnati
1939
R
4
Cincinnati
1941
R
4
Cincinnati
1941
D
2
Cincinnati
1945
CR
2
Cincinnati
1949
R
4
Cincinnati
1951
D
2
Cincinnati
1953
D
3
Cincinnati
1955
D
5
Cincinnati
1957
R
5
Worcester
1951
D
4
Worcester
1953
CD
3
Worcester
1955
CD
3
Worcester
1957
D
3
Worcester
1959
D
4
Worcester
1961
D
4

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