Working paper · July 2026 draft
The Positional Value and Redistributive Consequences of the Ballot Grid: Evidence from the Philippine Party-List Switch from an Alphabetical to a Randomized Ballot Grid
Nico Ravanilla and Lucas Zeng
In brief
Where a candidate sits on a crowded ballot changes their votes: the Philippine party-list election's switch from alphabetical to randomized ballot order shows that moving from the 10th to the 100th slot costs an organization 30 percent of its votes.
Abstract
The crowded ballots of modern democracies are grids, not lists. Where a candidate sits in the grid decides whether voters ever reach them, with real consequences for representation. We exploit the Philippine party-list election, whose four-column grid of up to 187 organizations was ordered alphabetically in 2010 and randomized in five elections since. The raffles identify the causal effect of grid position on vote share: moving from the tenth slot to the hundredth costs an organization 30 percent of its votes. Because positions vary by row and column, the grid reveals which scanning behavior produces the losses, something the single-column ballots of prior research cannot. Under the alphabet, the weakest organizations captured the best positions through strategic renaming; the raffle ended the capture and prevented its entrenchment. However, it still reallocated four to five seats every cycle to lucky drawers, suggesting a need to address ballot randomization's redistributive effects.
Cite
@misc{ravanilla_ballot,
title = {The Positional Value and Redistributive Consequences of the Ballot Grid: Evidence from the Philippine Party-List Switch from an Alphabetical to a Randomized Ballot Grid},
author = {Nico Ravanilla and Lucas Zeng},
howpublished = {Working paper},
}