Ranked Choice Expands Candidate Pools Briefly, Not Diversity or Long-Term Entry

🔎 What's Being Asked

Does switching to ranked choice voting (RCV) change who runs in local elections—how many candidates, how diverse they are, and how competitive they are?

🔍 How the evidence was assembled and compared

• Original data covering 273 U.S. cities over three decades.
• A preregistered difference-in-differences design with matching was used to compare cities that adopted RCV to similar cities that did not.

📈 What changed after RCV adoption

• The size of the candidate pool increases following RCV implementation.
• That increase is short-lived: the effect dissipates in later election cycles, producing no detectable long-term effect on candidate entry.
• The immediate boost in entrants is driven largely by lower-quality candidates who have little chance of winning.

👥 Who ran — and who didn’t

• No measurable effect was found on the share of female candidates.
• No measurable effect was found on the share of non-white candidates.

⚖️ Why this matters

These findings challenge several commonly claimed benefits of RCV. While RCV can temporarily expand the field of candidates, it does not produce sustained increases in entry nor improvements in descriptive representation at the local level. Policymakers and reform advocates should not assume RCV alone will increase candidate diversity or long-term competitiveness.