A name that rolls off the tongue appears to be worth votes. In decades of American election results, candidates with easier-to-pronounce surnames won a larger share of the vote, especially in party primaries.
The research note is by Jacob Harris of the Department of Government at Cornell University. It appeared in the April 2024 issue of Electoral Studies, volume 88, under the title “Does Brown beat Biesiada?”
Harris starts from a simple observation: the candidate’s name is the one piece of information every voter sees in every candidate-based election. When voters know little else, a name that is easy to process may feel more likable.
Three kinds of races, two measures of fluency
Harris used two large datasets. One covered every California school board and city council election from 1996 to 2020, with 48,170 candidate results. The other, drawn from Adam Bonica’s DIME database, covered US congressional primaries (17,089 candidacies) and general elections (15,601) from 1980 to 2018.
He measured name fluency in two ways. Pronounceability came from an algorithm developed by economists Qi Ge and Stephen Wu that rates names by how often their letter and sound combinations occur in English. Commonality came from Social Security baby name records and Census surname data.
The regressions controlled for race, sex, incumbency, name length and other factors, and dropped candidates who won 100 percent or 0 percent of the vote.
Primary voters lean hardest on names
Surname pronounceability was linked to more votes in all three settings. A one-standard-deviation increase went with a 0.79 percentage point gain in congressional general elections, 1.38 points in congressional primaries and 0.29 points in local races.
Harris gives an example. In a primary, a candidate named “Porterfield”, an average score, would be expected to get 1.38 points more than an identical rival named “Dovilla”, and 2.76 points more than one named “Konetchy”.
The effect in primaries was nearly twice as large as in general elections, which fits his prediction that names matter more when there is no party label to go on. The local-race figure was the smallest of the three, even though Harris had expected names to matter more in low-profile local contests than in congressional ones.
Name commonality gave murkier results. Only a common first name in primaries showed a clear positive link, and surname commonality in primaries was actually tied to fewer votes.
Names also carry race and ethnicity
Harris acknowledges that pronounceability is measured from an English speaker’s perspective, and that names carry racial and ethnic cues that are hard to separate from fluency. Splitting the analysis by race gave broadly similar results, though samples of Black and Hispanic candidates were small.
He notes that the results are somewhat sensitive to how fluency is measured. Still, his answer to the title question is a qualified yes: Brown does beat Biesiada.
Study Details:
- Title: Does Brown beat Biesiada? Name fluency and electoral success
- Authors: Jacob Harris
- Journal: Electoral Studies
- Publication Date: April 2024
- DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102759