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Beyond Left and Right: Using State Ballot Measures to Explore the Dimensionality of Mass Politics
Abstract: The nationalization of American politics has compressed electoral competition onto a single left-right axis across different levels of government. However, existing instruments for studying nationalization, such as candidate elections or roll-call scaling methods, are structurally biased against detecting non-partisan dimensions of political conflict when partisan polarization is high. These biases are amplified when concluding that state-level voter preferences have similarly nationalized.
I argue that analysis of state-level ballot initiative contests bypasses these structural biases and can surface cross-cutting dimensions of political conflict that have not been absorbed by partisan sorting. I apply principal component analysis to vote returns from ballot initiatives and gubernatorial (and presidential) elections in Massachusetts, Colorado, North Dakota, and Arizona between 2006 and 2024 to recover precinct-level ideal points and corresponding item loadings for ballot initiatives and gubernatorial (and presidential) candidates within a revealed-choice framework. I construct partisan- and issue-axes from these item loadings to analyze the extent of voter-preference nationalization and find evidence of locally distinctive policy preferences that cross the partisan divide.
Finally, I embed formal models of the ballot initiative proposal process in a “pivotal politics” environment to generate predictions about how the governor’s party and legislative control shape which policies reach the ballot, through which pathway, and in what quantity. These predictions align with observed empirical regularities in the swing state of Arizona.
Amartya Bose is a Visiting Lecturer in Politics at New York University. His research combines uses empirical and formal methods to study political attitudes and behavior in the United States, with a focus on cross-cutting preferences, Asian-American politics, campaign finance, and direct democracy.
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