Securing a line on the ballot: Measuring and explaining the restrictiveness of ballot access laws for non-major party candidates in the United States

This paper uses difference of means tests and OLS regression to analyze third party and independent candidate state-level petition signature requirements for President, U.S. Senate, and U.S. House in the United States. This paper finds that Daniel Elazar's [Elazar, D. J. (1966). American federalism: A view from the states. New York: Crowell] political culture framework has utility in explaining petition signature requirement variations across states. The paper found that moralistic states have significantly lower ballot access requirements for U.S. House races than individualistic and traditionalistic states. Multivariate analysis indicates that the presence of a moralistic political culture in a state is an important determinant of petition signature requirements. Another interesting finding is that states, on average, tend to have higher petition signature requirements for U.S. House than for statewide offices. This finding suggests that the major parties may perceive the influence of third parties to be greater for district-level offices, such as U.S. House, than for statewide offices.