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.

Summary: • This article discusses “correct voting”, which happens when fully informed voters make choices that most accurately reflect their views and preferences. Most people do not vote correctly, simply because they are not fully informed on the candidates and their actual positions. Correct voting happens more often when candidates are ideologically distinct, when campaigns spend more time or money in that voter’s state, and when people on an individual level care more about the election in which they are voting and its outcome. Consequences of incorrect voting are also discussed—“ We estimate that between 1980 and 2004 on average the Democratic candidate would have gotten about 6% more of the nationwide vote, major third-party candidates (when they were on the ballot) about 2.5% more of the nationwide vote, and the Republican candidate about 8% fewer votes, had all voters voted correctly.”

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

Summary:

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.

Summary:• Elections are the time where political parties inform people about how they stand on issues, and leaders that follow these issues. Some people are more informed voters because they actively research the candidates. Others are less informed because they do not actively look for information on the candidates. General stock information (GSI)- “political awareness” concept applied to voters’ aptitude and motivation absorbing information during campaigns. Campaign-specific information (CSI)- measures what voters learn about parties’ position on various issues during campaigns. The intensity of media signals on different issues has an important impact on who receives what information, and information gains have a significant impact on vote intentions.

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.

Summary:

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.

Summary: There are different ways that people learn about candidates. However, many ways that people are exposed to a candidate are very flawed and skewed. Political ads do not tell much about the candidate so can not be used to measure the knowledge gained by the voter. The knowledge a voter gains are from news programs seen or word of mouth. Other methods are not considered effective.