Low-information Elections Research Articles

Lost in Space? Shortcuts and Spatial Voting in Low-Information Elections

Voters face difficult choices in low-information local elections. Despite the concerns this raises for voter competence, there are virtually no studies of whether and when voters are able to choose candidates who best represent them ideologically in these contexts. We fill this gap by creating same-scale measures of candidate and voter ideology during a local election and examining how candidate ideology affects voters’ decisions. We also conduct an exit poll in which we experimentally manipulate cues and examine their effects on voters’ candidate preferences. Our results show that the ideological proximity of candidates has large effects on voters’ decisions. However, exposing voters to endorsements made by political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations diminishes, rather than enhances, voters’ propensity to prefer ideologically-similar candidates. These results challenge the notion that local elections are non-ideological and that citizens who have access to cues make “better” decisions than those who do not.

Does the Party Matter? Endorsements in Congressional Primaries

Research suggests that endorsements should affect outcomes in low-information elections such as primaries, but that hypothesis has not yet been tested empirically. Based on a survey of 2002 congressional campaigns, this article describes the universe of individuals and groups that offer endorsements to primary candidates and analyzes their effects on primary election results. It finds that a primary candidate’s share of the partisan endorsements issued in the race significantly affects the candidate’s vote share, even controlling for campaign funds and candidate quality. Implications for theories of candidate emergence and success are discussed.

Glass Ceiling or Glass Elevator: Are Voters Biased in Favor of Women Candidates in California Elections?

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Volume 3, Issue 1 Glass Ceiling or Glass Elevator: Are Voters Biased in Favor of Women Candidates in California Elections? Ronni Marie Abney University of California, Davis Rolfe Daus Peterson Mercyhurst College Abstract Conventional wisdom suggests voters are biased against women candidates for public office. Reluctance to support female candidates is thought to depress the number of votes women receive, causing them to lose more elections than males. Despite reasons to expect bias against female candidates, it is rarely found in em- pirical analysis. This paper examines circumstances in which voters may be biased in favor of women candidates. Voters in low-information elections may rely on gender to determine their vote. We hypothesize that the dearth of information may cause certain voters to collapse their votes onto women candidates. Thus, women candidates will do better than males in low-information elections. A test of this hy- pothesis, examining election returns for the California State Legislature from 2000 to 2006, finds some support for a positive bias. Keywords: women in politics, primary elections, cues and hueristics, California politics, gender bias, low-information elections www.bepress.com/cjpp

It's the Occupation, Stupid! Explaining Candidates' Success in Low-Information Elections

Do voters use ballot paper information on the personal characteristics of political candidates as cues in low-information elections? Using a unique dataset containing 4423 political candidates from recent local elections in Germany, we show that candidates' occupations do play a decisive role in their electoral success. The occupational impact is far greater than gender or doctoral degree effects for a large number of occupations. We discuss two possible explanations for these 'occupational effects': an occupation's public reputation and the extent to which individuals carrying out certain occupations are known within their communities. Looking at polls on the reputation/prestige of certain jobs, we find a strong correlation between an occupation's reputation and the electoral success of a candidate carrying out this occupation. Therefore, voters appear to use occupational reputation as a cue in low-information elections.

When Money Cannot Encourage Participation: Campaign Spending and Rolloff in Low Visibility Judicial Elections

Debates about the role of money in politics are commonplace. Although some critics point to the potentially negative impact spending has in elections, most recent scholarly evidence indicates that spending may actually promote greater participation in the political process. However, most of this research has uncovered this relationship in races for more visible offices; few studies have focused on whether the same linkage is present in low-information elections. For a variety of reasons, it is not altogether certain whether this relationship would exist for such offices. To test this proposition, we examine the impact of campaign spending on voter rolloff in 172 contested races for intermediate appellate courts (IAC) between 2000 and 2008. In contrast to other types of elections, combined candidate spending in these races had no effect on ballot rolloff.

A Little Information Can Be Dangerous Ballot Paper Design at Low Information Elections in Ireland

Ideology and policy issues play a relatively minor role in elections in Ireland. Recently, it seems policy discourse has declined further while there is a marked increase in the emphasis on image. This presents a challenge in explaining how voters make their decisions. Research on alphabetical and ordinal voting has already established an element of chance to voting behaviour. At the same time, Banducci, Karp, Rallings and Thrasher (2008) have identified that voters include the attractiveness of candidates as a factor in their decision-making. In an attempt to facilitate greater voting participation in Ireland, photographs of candidates have been placed on the ballot paper for local, national and European elections. This policy change was implemented to address a perceived knowledge deficit and to provide assistance for those with literacy difficulties. Additionally, many candidates have similar names and this was thought to render the choice on the ballot paper less clear. The addition of photographs was designed to improve participation and encourage engagement. Social psychology research has long demonstrated that people are willing to make significant judgements about a person when shown a photograph. The advent of ballot paper photographs allows candidates to be evaluated on the basis of their appearance. This research considers how this is occurring. Whilst photographs were introduced to improve political knowledge, this paper suggests that they may be used in an altogether different way. Ironically, providing additional knowledge to encourage greater participation and engagement, may have introduced a new level of superficiality into the voter decision-making process. The paper will present data from an experimental study on ballot paper design taken at the 2009 elections in the Republic of Ireland. Using ballot paper photographs from a Dublin local electoral area, replica ballot papers were developed and tested in different parts of the country. The paper will demonstrate that voters are willing to use photographs in their decision making process. It will develop a hierarchy of cues employed by voters at low information elections.

Ballot Paper Photographs and Low-Information Elections in Ireland

In an attempt to facilitate greater voting participation in the Republic of Ireland, photographs of candidates have been placed on the ballot paper for local, national and European elections. Limited research undertaken in advance of the implementation of the photograph policy advised that the measure would assist people with literacy problems. However, social psychology research has long demonstrated that people are willing to make considerable judgements about a person when shown a photograph. The advent of ballot paper photographs allows candidates to be evaluated on the basis of their appearance. This article will explore how photographs could have become a factor in voter decision-making. Providing additional knowledge to encourage greater participation and engagement has introduced a possible new level of superficiality into the voter decision-making process.

Modern Machines: Patronage, Information, and Incumbency in Local Elections

That incumbents are highly likely to win reelection is a well established pattern at all levels of government in the United States. Scholars have debated the degree to which incumbents are advantaged as a result of selection, responsiveness to voters, or institutional insulation. Research has suffered from endogeneity at the state and federal levels, and at the local level little research exists. This paper begins to address these problems. First, I lay out a theoretical framework for distinguishing between systems in which responsiveness is encouraged versus systems in which incumbents can be reelected without regard to their effectiveness as representatives. I refer to this as the contestability of the political arena. Contestability is measured by the degree to which constituents' information about governmental performance or available alternatives is limited, the degree to which the entry, exit, or behavior of candidates or voters is restricted, and the degree to which incumbents' control over government seats is insulated from their vote share. Then I turn to an empirical analysis of the incumbency advantage in municipal elections. I employ a regression discontinuity design to show that selection effects can not wholly explain the incumbency advantage. Then I provide evidence that low-information elections and large patronage workforces increase the proportion of incumbents who run for reelection and the proportion who win. Finally, I show that spending is disconnected from demographic change in cities with low-information environments.

Transformed Facial Similarity as a Political Cue: A Preliminary Investigation

Experimental subjects evaluated a political candidate whose face was digitally altered to absorb the subjects' facial structure. For half of the subjects, the photograph of the candidate was morphed such that the image presented was a blend composed of 60% of the unfamiliar Caucasian male and 40% of the subject. For the other half the photograph was unaltered. Given previous research on implicit familiarity (Zajonc, 1968, 1980), we predicted that the morph would advantage the candidate. The results demonstrated no main effect of the similarity manipulation. However, there was a robust similarity by gender interaction. Male subjects evaluated the morphed candidate more favorably than the unaltered photograph, while female subjects rated him more negatively. We discuss potential explanations for this interaction effect and explore the possible implications of facial similarity as a political cue in both high- and low-information elections.

Gender, Ethnicity, and Ballot Information: Ballot Cues in Low-Information Elections

AbstractIn November 1996, voters cast ballots for candidates running for 57 seats on 15 community advising and zoning boards in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Voters had little knowledge about the candidates or the boards that had been created only a few months earlier. The candidates campaigned for seven weeks. The local media generally ignored them. There were no incumbents and no party labels in the non-partisan contests. In low-information local elections such as these, voter cues and ballot design plays a decisive role in voter choice. The cues in this election were candidates' gender, ethnicity, campaign expenditures, and ballot position. Our results indicate that the most important cue was candidate gender; however, voters used ethnicity to decide whether they voted for men or women. The number of candidates on the ballot impacted vote share, while ballot position played no significant role. Those candidates who spent the most campaign money were also preferred. We argue that vote cues provide a means to address voter fatigue, where gender, ethnicity, and name recognition provide cues in this low-information, high voter fatigue situation. Our results suggest that by spending greater on their campaigns, Hispanic women—the most disadvantaged of the candidates—could run competitively against Hispanic men.

Candidate Occupations and Voter Information Shortcuts

Voters in low-information elections frequently rely on heuristics or information shortcuts when making their decisions of whom to support. While existing research on these shortcuts has examined many candidate characteristics, it has largely overlooked the potential of candidate occupational cues. This article uses experimental survey data conducted by the Los Angeles Times Poll in the 1994 statewide elections in California to analyze whether candidates' occupational ballot designations influence voters' choices. Specifically, it hypothesizes that voters use candidate occupational labels to infer candidates' competence or qualifications for the office in question. As the analysis demonstrates, candidate occupational cues have two simultaneous effects on voting behavior: they help voters make a decision in races where they otherwise might not have, decreasing abstention; and in races in which voters infer one candidate to have a qualification advantage, the addition of occupational designations makes voter...

The Partisan Heuristic in Low-Information Elections

Much literature has focused on the influence of partisan information on voter decision making. In this article, we attempt to gain a better understanding of this effect by comparing the survey responses of vote-choice questions that provide party labels and those that do not. We show that less educated survey respondents are substantially less likely to express a vote preference when party labels are not available to them. In addition, we also find evidence that those who can state a vote intention in nonpartisan races are less able to link their candidate choice to their party identification. We conclude by demonstrating that, when surveys do not provide partisan cues, the small number of re- spondents who are willing to state their vote intentions and the large number of those who appear to be guessing create great difficulties for pollsters trying to predict election results.

Race, Immorality and Money in the American Baha'i Community: Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly

This article analyses the dissolution of the Baha'i local assembly of Los Angeles in 1986–88 by the National Assembly. Official explanations for this move focused on lapses in morality and administrative discipline, but local interviewees, as well as some official pronouncements, suggest that the conflict had two roots: the globalisation of the community and resultant ethnic conflict among whites, African–Americans and newly immigrant Iranians; and national/local conflicts over power and money. Low-information elections, the unaccountability of elected officials, censorship and difficulties in acknowledging social conflict were the causes of these episodes in the Baha'i religion.

Race and Gender Cues in Low-Information Elections

Race and Gender Cues in Low-Information Elections

Race and Gender Cues in Low-Information Elections

Previous research has demonstrated that in low-information elections voters compensate for a lack of information by taking informational short-cuts, based on candidate cues, to make voting decisions. To date, this research has focused on candidate party identification and incumbency cues. This article argues that candidate demographic cues, specifically race and gender, also play an influential role. Unlike past psychological research that focuses on potential voter bias against women or black candidates, this article examines the informational content of voters' stereotypes about women and black candidates, and how these stereotypes affect voting behavior. I use quasi-experimental data from the Los Angeles Times Poll to demonstrate that candidate gender and candidate race signal voters in two different ways. Voters stereotype candidates ideologically: women and black candidates are stereotyped as more liberal than the average white male. Voters also stereotype candidates on issues: black candidates are seen as more concerned with minority rights than whites; while women candidates are viewed as more dedicated to honest government. As a result, voters choose candidates for office based on how much they agree or disagree with the ideological and issue positions they attribute, through stereotyping, to candidates.

Voting Cues in Low-Information Elections: Candidate Gender as a Social Information Variable in Contemporary United States Elections

Theory: Theories of low-information voting are used to examine the effect of candidate demographic characteristics on voting behavior, specifically candidate gender. Hypotheses: For voters in low-information elections, candidate gender operates as a social information cue signaling that women candidates are more liberal than men candidates of the same party. As a result, the gender of a candidate affects ideological voting. Method: Logistic regression analysis is performed on data from the 1986 through 1994 American National Election Studies. Results: Women Democratic candidates fare better than men Democratic candidates among more liberal voters and worse among conservative voters, especially those with minimal knowledge of the candidates. The effect is less clear with Republican women candidates who provide conflicting informational cues (woman and Republican).