Who prefers nonpartisan elections? The role of individual party ID and county partisanship

Abstract

To what extent does the public prefer local government officials to be selected via nonpartisan, as opposed to partisan, elections? Do preferences vary across different types of local offices? Do Democrats and Republicans systematically differ in their preference for nonpartisan versus partisan local elections? Using a novel dataset based on the 2018 and 2020 CES, I find that while nonpartisan elections are the modal preference for local offices, the proportion of voters favoring this model varies with office-type, party ID, and whether respondents live in counties with a majority of their co-partisans. Specifically, Democrats are more likely to prefer nonpartisan elections for local offices than are Republicans, but there is only evidence for these inter-party differences in Republican-leaning counties. County partisanship also has a significant effect on intra-party variation in preference for nonpartisan elections to certain local offices.