Research on instant-runoff and ranked-choice elections

Given the interest in Maine’s ranked-choice election tomorrow, I thought that this recent paper with Ines Levin and Thad Hall might be of interest. The paper was recently published in American Politics Research, “Low-information voting: Evidence from instant-runoff elections.” . Here’s the paper’s abstract:

How do voters make decisions in low-information contests? Although some research has looked at low-information voter decision making, scant research has focused on data from actual ballots cast in low-information elections. We focus on three 2008 Pierce County (Washington) Instant-Runoff Voting (IRV) elections. Using individual-level ballot image data, we evaluate the structure of individual rankings for specific contests to determine whether partisan cues underlying partisan rankings are correlated with choices made in nonpartisan races. This is the first time that individual-level data from real elections have been used to evaluate the role of partisan cues in nonpartisan races. We find that, in partisan contests, voters make avid use of partisan cues in constructing their preference rankings, rank-ordering candidates based on the correspondence between voters’ own partisan preferences and candidates’ reported partisan affiliation. However, in nonpartisan contests where candidates have no explicit partisan affiliation, voters rely on cues other than partisanship to develop complete candidate rankings.

There’s a good review of the literature on voting behavior in ranked-choice or instant-runoff elections in the paper, for folks interested in learning more about what research has been done so far on this topic.