Low-information Voters Research Articles

Between Michigan and Rochester: Identity-based thinking is cognitively primary

This article synthesizes a large body of research in the social and cognitive sciences to develop a distinctly cognitive understanding of political identity. Building on dual-process and computational theories of mind, the article defends three claims about the mental and behavioral implications of identity in political domains: (1) identity-based thinking is people’s default (often fast, automatic, and cognitively inaccessible) way of mentally representing politics and of drawing inferences based on those representations; (2) people are not limited to identity-based thinking and can sometimes learn to override it via slow, volitional, and conscious reasoning; and (3) the cognitive complexity of identity-based thinking is in-between the levels of mental sophistication that the Michigan and Rochester Schools in political science posit. This account of political identity illuminates, inter alia, why even low-information voters can quickly identify their political allies and opponents, why even high-information politicians can misperceive their constituents, why affective polarization has been increasing in the United States in recent decades, and why many normative theories of justice advise people to override identity-based thinking.

Trump is Here to Stay

AbstractThe rest of the world worries about Trump's bellicosity, ignorance, and patronising arrogance. In the US he presents a clear and present danger to civility and democracy. His xenophobia and racism, his deep resentment of our educated elites and his ignorance of and contempt for much of our history mark his politics. He has found a supportive public, perhaps about 40 per cent of the electorate, in what the experts politely termed ‘low information voters’. Many are white working‐class citizens who think themselves left behind by the economy (rightly) and suffering disadvantages as compared to allegedly favoured immigrants, Afro‐Americans and Latinos. A large charge of anger at the independence of women accompanies this complex. Trump, schooled in the most vulgar aspects of television, keeps attention on his antics whilst a piratical gang of ideologues and political operatives staff his government. They are proceeding with systematic intensity to the destruction of our regulatory state and the eventual destruction of our welfare state. Perhaps the special prosecutor will bring down Trump; perhaps we face a severe constitutional crisis as he defies the juridical system. Trumpism will not disappear with Trump. He has brought to the centre of our politics the entire spectrum of our social pathologies, has seized the Republican party and neutralised a Democratic party which cannot quite escape nostalgia for its better day and is, above all, incapable of presenting solutions to the twenty‐first century problems of the nation.

The Cognitive and Emotional Sources of Trump Support: The Case of Low-Information Voters

This article provides empirical evidence for the hypothesis that Donald Trump distinctively attracted unprecedented levels of support from “low-information voters.” The findings suggest that his campaign exploited a void of facts and reasoning among these voters that made them more vulnerable to relying on emotions about Mexican immigrants, Muslim refugees, and African-American citizens, as well as their disdain for the first African-American President Barack Obama. As a result, these Trump supporters were less in a position to want or be able to question Trump’s seemingly unprecedented campaign of misstatements, untruths, and lies. The article discusses the implications for US politics in the Trump era and beyond.

Literacy, Information, and Party System Fragmentation in India

A rich theoretical literature argues that, in contradiction to Duverger’s law, the plurality voting rule can fail to produce two-party system when voters do not share their common information about the electoral situation. We present an empirical operationalization and a series of tests of this informational hypothesis in the case of India using constituency- and individual-level data. In highly illiterate constituencies where access to information and information sharing among voters is low, voters often fail to coordinate on the two most viable parties. In highly literate constituencies, voters are far more successful at avoiding vote-wasting—in line with the informational hypothesis. At a microlevel, these aggregate-level patterns are driven by the interaction of individual information and the informational context: In dense informational environments, even low-information voters can successfully identify viable parties and vote for them, but in sparse informational environments, individual access to information is essential for successful strategic voting.

Personal Experience and Public Opinion: A Theory and Test of Conditional Policy Feedback

Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that personal experience with public health insurance programs exerts a causal influence on attitudes toward both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. However, we argue that the conditional dynamics of these policy feedback effects differ from standard models of opinion formation and change. Specifically, we find that personal experience can shape preferences among those whose partisanship might otherwise make them resistant to elite messaging; in the case of support for health policy, we find effects of public programs are most pronounced among Republicans. In addition, we find that the effects of personal experience, unlike attempts to shape attitudes through elite political messaging, are concentrated among low-information voters who might otherwise not be attuned to the political environment.

Het geslacht van de kandidaat als heuristisch stemmotief

In this paper, I study gender-based voting behavior in the Belgian proportional electoral system. In particular, I investigate two possible causes for why voters experience the need to simplify their voting decision by using a gender-cue. First, in line with the findings of previous studies, I find that voters with lower levels of political sophistication who are less able to collect and process political information, are consequently more likely to use the sex of a candidate as a shortcut. However, the effect of political sophistication on gender-based voting behavior is limited. Second, based on the literature, I expect that the low information context of the second-order European elections would cause both high and low information voters to become more reliant on gendercues to simplify their voting decision and by extent would cause the effect of political sophistication on gender-based voting to diminish. Against theoretical expectations, I find that the effect of the electoral context is negligible.

Literacy, Information, and Party System Fragmentation in India

A rich theoretical literature argues that, in contradiction to the Duverger’s law, the plurality voting rule can fail to produce two-party system when voters do not share common information about the electoral situation. We present an empirical operationalization and a series of tests of this informational hypothesis in the case of India using constituency- and individual-level data. In highly illiterate constituencies where access to information and information-sharing among voters is low, voters often fail to coordinate on the two most viable parties. In highly literate constituencies, voters are far more successful at avoiding vote-wasting – in line with the informational hypothesis. At a micro-level, these aggregate-level patterns are driven by the interaction of individual information and the informational context: in dense informational environments, even low-information voters can successfully identify viable parties and vote for them, but in sparse informational environments, individual access to information is essential for successful strategic voting.

Siła celebrytów w kampanii wyborczej

The article presents analysis of perceptions of electoral chances of celebrity candidates, and opinions about influence of celebrity endorsements on voters decisions among voters in the 2014 European Parliament elections and local elections in the same year in Poland.From 30% up to 50% of electorates of all except one party agree with the preposition that celebrities have bigger chances to win elections than traditional politicians. The only exception are voters of New Right of Janusz Korwin–Mikke. Up to 57% of electorates tend to agree with claims that celebrity endorsement have significant influence on voters decision. In this case neither party identification nor declared ideology is significant differentiator. These findings interpreted in terms of the low information rationality theory suggest that utilisation of celebrity in electoral campaings my serve as an important cue for a low information voters.

Incorrect voting in the 2012 U.S. presidential election: How partisan and economic cues fail to help low-information voters

The importance of voting in undisputed, yet scholarly works attempting to understand the causes and consequences of incorrect voting are relatively scarce. Building on the works of Lau and Redlawsk (1997, 2006; Lau et al., 2008), I design and implement a new survey method measuring incorrect voting I call Self-identified Incorrect Voting (SIV). This method allows survey respondents to determine for themselves if they voted incorrectly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I conducted the SIV survey of a national sample of voters and use the results to test traditional hypotheses regarding the value of partisanship and the economy as cues to help low-information voters behave in the same manner as high-information voters.

Political Knowledge and Exposure to the 2012 US Presidential Debates: Does Debate Format Matter?

ABSTRACTExtant literature shows a positive link between presidential debates and political knowledge, with findings strongest for low-information voters. Considering presidential debates continue to retain a mass audience, they fulfill an invaluable civic function. Less clear is whether knowledge effects hold across debate formats and agenda topics. Using an experimental method that exposes a sample of undergraduate students to the 2012 US presidential debates, this article explores variance in knowledge effects across formats and topics. We find citizens can learn about issues and candidates but debate format and agenda topics may mediate the effects. We discuss the broader democratic implications of these findings and directions for future debate research.

Informing Consent: Voter Ignorance, Political Parties, and Election Law

This Article examines what law can do to enable an electorate comprised of mostly ignorant voters to obtain meaningful representation and to hold elected officials accountable for the government’s performance. Drawing on a half-century of research by political scientists, we argue that political parties are both the key to good elections and a common cause of electoral dysfunction. Party labels can help rational, low-information voters by providing them with credible, low cost, and easily understood signals of candidates’ ideology and policy preferences. But in federal systems, any number of forces may result in party cues that are poorly calibrated to the electorate and issue space of subnational governments. Further, the geographic clustering of partisan voters can lead to persistently dysfunctional elections at subnational levels, however well calibrated the major-party cues, because in these communities the aggregation of votes will not neutralize (as it otherwise would) the ballots cast by citizens whose party ties reflect their upbringing and social milieu more than their observations about what the government has done. To date, these problems have largely been the province of political science and sociology. We argue that they are problems of, and for, election law. Statutes and court decisions govern who selects a party’s candidates, what information appears on the ballot, and any number of other variables that affect the meaning and utility of party labels. Our analysis challenges the focus of decades of political science and legal scholarship, and sheds new light on important questions about party regulation, ballot design, the choice between partisan and nonpartisan elections, and the constitutional law of party rights.

Gender Affinity Effects in Vote Choice in Westminster Systems: Assessing “Flexible” Voters in Canada

Under certain conditions, women are more likely than men to vote for women candidates, a phenomenon referred to as a “gender affinity effect.” Causal mechanisms connecting women voters to women candidates are gender consciousness, desire for descriptive representation, support for liberal social policy, the use of gender as a shortcut to vote choice among low-information voters, and a “party-sex overlap.” Existing work is focused on American elections, which tend to be candidate centered, so little is known about gender affinity effects between voters and candidates in other contexts. This article focuses on Westminster-style parliamentary systems, using the Canadian federal elections of 2000 and 2004 as test cases. Women in these systems have the same motivations to gravitate toward women candidates, for they are gender conscious and desire descriptive representation. But they do not have the same incentives to cast ballots for women because political institutions and practices tend to discourage candidate-based voting. The article pays particular attention to a segment of the electorate we call “flexible” voters, which is comprised of independents, leaners, and defectors. In Westminster systems, it is this group of voters who should be most sensitive to candidate-based considerations.

What You Use Depends on What You Have

This article examines the effects on the use of determinants of electoral choice of varying levels of politically-relevant information in the electorate. A theoretical framework is introduced that accounts for different usages of cues to vote choice, even among voters with similar goals, based on differing amounts of information. The 1972-74-76 Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research Panel Study is used to test the hypothesis that low information voters will emphasize different cues to vote choice than medium information voters, who will also differ from high information voters. This hypothesis is confirmed by the findings, and a number of conclusions about the nature of electoral choice are drawn.