A Crucial Test of Alphabetic Voting: The Elections at the University of Leiden, 1973–1978

Politicians and political scientists have long known that there is a slight tendency among voters to prefer candidates whose names appear at the top of the ballot compared with lower-placed candidates, and hence that ceteris paribus the former have a somewhat better chance of being elected than the latter. When the candidates' names appear on the ballot in alphabetical order, this positional voting bias is usually called ‘alphabetic voting’. It is of special importance and interest in preferential voting systems where the voters may indicate their first, second, third, etc., preferences among a list of candidates, as in the single-transferable vote elections to the Irish Dáil, or where they must do so, as in the alternative-vote elections to the Australian House of Representatives.