Exposure to Campaign and Partisan Voting: The Moderating Roles of Voters' Political Predispositions

Abstract

How do partisan citizens respond to campaign information and make voting decisions? We theorise that the association between exposure to campaign information and partisan voting is moderated by citizens' political predispositions — strength of partisanship, political sophistication, and election interest. To test our expectations, we used Australian Election Studies data from 2013, 2016, and 2019. We found that partisans who are exposed to campaign information tend to follow their party preference when strength of partisanship is high. For political sophistication, we found that the influence of campaign information on partisan voting is not conditional on sophistication. For election interest, we found a moderating effect of election interest whereby partisan individuals who encountered campaign information were more inclined to choose their own party when interest was low and more inclined to support their opposing party when interest was high.