2. Symbols in politics

In many democracies, political parties or candidates must include election symbols next to their names on the ballot. These symbols are intended as an aid for voters incapable of reading candidate names, though the policy has persisted in democracies with high levels of literacy. These symbols are assigned or chosen some time before the election, and politicians often make these symbols a central part of their advertising and branding. However, while symbols are often discussed in ethnographic accounts of elections, the authors are aware of no study of their effects.

Voters, especially those who are tired or lack information, may rely on cognitive heuristics to make decisions among candidates. In the case of ballot order, they may assume that candidates listed first are more qualified and important than others, or simply be unwilling to process names after the first. Symbols are potentially much more evocative signifiers than ballot order. In the case of established political parties, they may become associated with traditions of electoral success, or with specific policies. The rooster symbol, for instance, was closely associated with the Democratic party and with white supremacy in the state of Louisiana, and when in 1948 the state's rights faction of the party claimed the rooster for Strom Thurmond and forced Harry Truman to use the donkey symbol, this was considered decisive in destroying Truman's chances in the state (Key, Reference Key1949, 341). Even symbols with no past electoral use may convey information to voters. The Italian Christian Democrat's cross symbol, for instance, conveyed a message about the relationship between the party and the catholic church. In these situations, voters are using symbols to infer candidate ideology and qualifications in much the same way they might use party identification (Bonneau and Cann, Reference Bonneau and Cann2015) or candidate occupation (McDermott, Reference McDermott2005) when those are listed on the ballot.

However, even pictures of everyday objects may convey semiotic content. A lantern, for instance, may convey images of light and enlightenment, guidance, and leadership. Voters may use these symbols to infer candidate's ideology or qualifications even when they symbol assignment has only a limited relationship to their actual traits. To quote Muraoka (Reference Muraoka2021, 315) “confused with a complicated set of options, some voters may find it more difficult to make appropriate judgments about the policy and performance of candidates…[and] perhaps even inadvertently, rely on seemingly minor cues that they easily find at the polling station without regard for their relevance to candidates’ quality.” Such behavioral preferences for superficial traits are well-known in consumer product marketing, where the color or design of logos and packaging strongly influences brand image and consumer choice (Bottomley and Doyle, Reference Bottomley and Doyle2006).

How should candidates respond to this voter behavior? In general, they should try to choose symbols that have positive connotations for voters: strength, competence, benevolence, etc. Which symbols carry such connotations, of course, varies from culture to culture, and from constituency to constituency, so the choices of candidates should vary spatially, unlike the strategic responses of candidates to ballot position (Gulzar et al., Reference Gulzar, Ruiz and RobinsonForthcoming). At a minimum, candidates should favor goods which are familiar to voters, in order to maximize the number of voters making inferences based on the symbol, or to make the candidate seem more familiar to voters.Footnote ¹

Note that a candidate with a desirable symbol might alter her behavior to further emphasize the role of the symbol in her campaigning, increasing the visibility of the symbol and their association with it, while candidates with a less desirable symbol make less use of it. In practice, this means that our estimates are a composite of the effect of symbols and the effect of candidates’ behavioral response to their allotted symbol. Without very detailed data on candidates’ visual messaging, disentangling these two mechanisms is impossible. However, both mechanisms are based on the same basic behavioral claims: that some voters vote based on symbols, and that some symbols are contextually more appealing than others.

To summarize, we expect that (1) symbols should influence vote choice, (2) more “effective” symbols should be more popular, and that (3) candidates should chose symbols that are familiar to their constituencies. In the rest of the note, we causally test the first of these claims, and provide some descriptive evidence regarding the other two.

3. Election symbols in India

In India, the world's largest democracy, symbols were instituted at independence as an essential tool for voting in a society with high illiteracy. India is a federal parliamentary democracy where both state and national legislatures are elected from single-member districts using a plurality system. Each candidate has a symbol printed next to their name and button on the electronic voting machine.

Candidates of electorally successful national and state parties (“recognized parties”) are guaranteed the exclusive use of their symbols. These symbols, like the hand of the Indian National Congress and the lotus of the Bharatiya Janata Party, are universally known and closely associated with the parties in question. When parties split, the faction gets the party symbol, which is regarded as having a major advantage. Candidates of “unrecognized” parties, which are unable to meet the minimum electoral performance to be recognized, must choose their symbols from a list of 198 free symbols created by the national Election CommissionFootnote ², though once they have done so they get the symbol everywhere they run candidates. Most of these symbols are drawings of everyday objects. Figure 1 shows images of the most popular free symbols.

Figure 1.

The five most popular free symbols in Tamil Nadu, 2016–21.

Independent candidates are allotted symbols from among the free symbols not claimed by the unrecognized parties. They are allowed (but not required) to list their top three choices of symbol on their nomination forms. Candidates are allotted their top choice if no other candidate wants it. If several independent candidates want the same symbol, the District Electoral Officer (a senior bureaucrat) conducts a drawing of lots to determine who gets it. The losing candidates in the lottery are allotted the next symbol listed on their form if available, and otherwise are allotted a randomly chosen free symbol.

The high value of symbols to parties can be seen in the intrigues within the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), one of the two major parties in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Under longtime leaders M. G. Ramachandran (MGR) and J. Jayalalithaa, the party's two-leaves symbol had become ubiquitous on walls and banners in Tamil Nadu. According to the party website, the two-leaves symbol showed Jayalalithaa “is two times the magnificence of other leaders” and “will work double for its people.”Footnote ³ After Jayalalitha's 2016 death, the party was gripped by a factional struggle between her former aides O Panneerselvam (OPS) and Edapaddi K Palaniswamy (EPS) and T. T. V. Dhinakaran, the nephew of Jayalalitha's longtime companion. Both petitioned the election commission for “the famed Two Leaves, [which] has a history of bestowing credibility and cementing loyalty.” The election commission was unable to decide, and granted EPS and Dhinakaran the hat and OPS the electric pole. Both sides were aware of the symbolic possibilities of these choices. Hat-wearing EPS supporters proclaimed that “the Hat is very favourable for us because our leader MGR always wore a hat. We'll wear the hat and camp and it will be definitely effective,” while OPS supporters were pleased that “the symbol in some sense resembles the…two leaves” and that “it was not long ago that Chennai corporation converted all the lamps in city into the two lamps model, and that…has made their job familiarising the twin lamps easy.”Footnote ⁴ When EPS and Dhinakaran fell out, the election commission granted OPS and EPS the two leaves, while Dhinakaran was granted his own symbols, first the pressure cooker, then the gift box, and then the pressure cooker again.

It is difficult to overstate the role of election symbols in the visual culture of India politics. Banerjee (Reference Banerjee2013, 120) notes that “party symbols are used liberally in all campaign materials; party supporters are encouraged to sport clothing, umbrellas, caps, and scarves marked by the party symbol and in the colours of the party thereby creating maximum visibility and subliminal awareness among voters during a campaign. Great play is also made on the names of parties and the symbols…Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party made the most of his party's symbol, which is a bicycle…he cycled thousands of miles across Uttar Pradesh… By doing so he could convey a message about his down-to-earth nature, his accessibility, his desire to identify with the common person despite his expensive overseas education, and his youth and vigor with which he hoped to replace his aging and unwell father.” During the campaign they are painted over walls throughout the country, and independent candidates regard the fact that they are assigned symbols only after nomination, a major disadvantage in making themselves know to voters.

4. Data and estimation

To study the effect of symbols, we focus on four elections in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. While the list of available symbols and the lot drawing policy are implemented nationally, they are difficult to study because each candidate's top three symbol choices are listed on their nomination forms. These forms, unlike the much-studied affidavits of assets and criminal cases which candidates also submit, are not usually made public, but the Chief Electoral Officer of Tamil Nadu began posting them online in 2019. We scrapped these forms, which were then manually translated from the original handwritten Tamil. These data were then merged with the candidate affidavit data digitized by the Association for Democratic Reforms and the Trivedi Center's Election data.

The data cover four different elections for two different bodies held on three separate days. The 2016 and 2021 state elections chose members for the 234 seats in the state assembly of Tamil Nadu. In April 2019, elections were held for Tamil Nadu's 39 seats in the national parliament, as well as by-elections in 18 state assembly constituencies.

We focus on independent candidates, since they can choose their symbols. Across the four elections, we have data on the symbol choices of 3628 independent candidates.Footnote ⁵ Of these, 1.3 percent were illegible, 23.7 percent did not indicate a choice, 19.0 percent choose a symbol not on the permitted list, 11.3 percent choose a valid symbol but had their first choice preempted by a unrecognized party, 28.7 percent received their unique first choice, and 9.7 percent made conflicting first choices and were entered into the drawing of lots. We focus on the last category in our causal estimation of the effects of symbols and the last three categories in our descriptive study of symbol choice.Footnote ⁶ Note that the causal results apply only to the subgroup of candidates choosing “disputed” symbols, who are dissimilar to other candidates in several respects (Table A3).

The dependent variable is logged vote choice in percent. The unlogged variable is strongly right-skewed, as shown in Figure A.1. While a few independent candidates win sizable votes, in Tamil Nadu's two block party system most do very poorly, with the median independent earning only 0.08 percent of the vote. A balance test (Table A.1) shows that lottery winners and losers are similar on pretreatment observables.

While winning the lottery is random, in the overall sample there is heterogeneity between winners and losers in the distributions of symbol choice (since there can be several losers but only one winner) and there is also heterogeneity between constituencies and across types of elections in the level of political competition. For these reasons, the main models include fixed effects for each drawing of lots (year-constituency-first choice symbol). For this reason, the estimates we present are the effect of winning the lottery conditional on constituency and symbol choice, neither of which vary within strata. Standard errors are clustered at the constituency-year level to account for the interdependence of vote choice in a race. The estimating equation is thus:

$$Log( VoteShare) _{ijt} = \beta_0 + \beta_1 LotteryWinner_{it} + \beta_2 F_{ljt} + \epsilon_{ijt}$$

where Log(VoteShare)_ijt is the logarithm of vote share of candidate i of constituency j in year t, LotteryWinner _i is the dummy variable indicating whether candidate i won the lottery, F _ljt is the lottery fixed effect in year-constituency-first choice level, and $\epsilon _{ijt}$ is the error term.