The Economics of Split-Ticket Voting in Representative Democracies

In U.S. elections, voters often vote for candidates from different parties for president and Congress. Voters also express dissatisfaction with the performance of Congress as a whole and satisfaction with their own representative. We develop a model of split-ticket voting in which government spending is financed by uniform taxes but the benefits from this spending are concentrated. While the model generates splitticket voting, overall spending is too high only if the president’s powers are limited. Overall spending is too high in a parliamentary system, and our model can be used as the basis of an argument for term limits. *Chari, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and University of Minnesota; Jones, Northwestern University; Marimon, European University Institute. We thank Rodolfo E. Manuelli, Roger Myerson, Thomas Sargent, seminar participants at a number of places, the editors and referees of the American Economic Review for useful discussions and comments, and the National Science Foundation for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System. In this paper, we present a simple economic model to capture certain features of the U.S. political system. A widely held view of the political process in the United States is that people vote for a president and representatives whose preferences are closest to their own. Typically, this view is formalized in theoretical models as the median voter theorem. That is, the president and Congress represent the preferences of the median voter. Three observations call this view into question: 1. There is a substantial amount of split-ticket voting (i.e., voters vote for a candidate from one party in the presidential election and a candidate from another party in the congressional election), and this phenomenon seems to be growing. If parties represent general political philosophies and voters choose candidates solely on the basis of this philosophy, this phenomenon conflicts with the median voter view. 2. When asked, people are highly dissatisfied with the performance of Congress as a whole. For example, the percentage of people saying that they have “a lot of confidence” in the leaders of Congress has averaged around 15 percent over the last 20 years, reaching a low of 9 percent in 1980 (USA Today, 4/1/92). 3. There is a substantial difference in approval ratings of Congress as a whole and those of individual representatives. For example, in surveys from May 1989 to March 1992 conducted by USA Today, the average approval rating for individual representatives by their constituents was 61 percent, while it was only 38 percent for Congress as a whole. Observations 2 and 3 are in direct conflict with the view that the president’s and representatives’ actions reflect the preferences of the median voter and therefore conflict with the median voter theorem. A broader literature (see, for example, Dennis C. Mueller 1989 and Peter J.