Voter Knowledge

This is a page for students of PS 240. On 10/8 and 10/6 we discussed voter knowledge.

Possible Exam Questions

1. Nobody has suggested any yet.

Readings

S.L. Althaus (1998). Information effects in collective preferences. American Political Science Review, 92, 545.

Summary:o This study focuses on voter information. If the population as a whole were fully informed on the issues, would the popular opinion of these issues change? This study compares simulated “fully informed” collective opinions to the preferences revealed in the original data from which the simulations were taken. The results showed that “group differences in knowledge, along with the public’s modest average level of political knowledge, can cause significant distortions in measures of collective opinion.” This suggests that information, to the extent that it really does influence politics, can impair the responsiveness of governments to their citizens.

L.M. Bartels (1996). Uninformed votes: Information effects in presidential elections. American Journal of Political Science, 40, 194.

Summary: [directly from the article] Theory--Recent scholarship has emphasized the potential importance of cues, information shortcuts, and statistical aggregation processes in allowing relatively uninformed citizens to act, individually or collectively, as if they were fully informed.

Hypotheses--Uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave as if they were fully informed. When that fails, individual deviations from fully informed voting cancel out in a mass electorate, producing the same aggregate election outcome as if voters were fully informed.:

Methods--Hypothetical fully informed vote choices are imputed to individual voters using the observed relationship between political information and vote choices for voters with similar social and demographic characteristics, estimated by probit analysis of data from National Election Study surveys conducted after the six most recent US presidential elections.:

Results--Both hypotheses are clearly disconfirmed. At the individual level, the average deviation of actual vote probabilities from hypothetical fully informed vote probabilities was about ten percentage points. In the electorate as a whole, these deviations were significantly diluted by aggregation, but by no means eliminated: incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points better and Democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better, than they would have if voters had in fact been “fully informed”.:

R.R. Lau, Andersen, D. J. and Redlawsk, D. P. (2008). An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections. American Journal of Political Science, 52, 395-411.

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T.M. Holbrook (2006). Cognitive Style and Political Learning in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Campaign. Political Research Quarterly, 59, 343-352.

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R. Nadeau, Nevitte, N., Gidengil, E. and Blais, A. (2008). Election Campaigns as Information Campaigns: Who Learns What and Does it Matter? Political Communication, 25, 229-248.

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B.I. Page and R.Y. Shapiro (2001). Rational public opinion. In R.G. Niemi and H. F. Weisberg, editors, Controversies in voting behavior, 4th edition. CQ Press: Washington, D.C. Pages 164-179.

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T.N. Ridout, Shah, D. V., Goldstein, K. M. and Franz, M. M. (2004). Evaluating Measures of Campaign Advertising Exposure on Political Learning. Political Behavior, 26, 201-225.

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