THESIS STATEMENT: My aim is to use the observed relationship betwen information and voting behavior in recent elections to simulate the behavior of a hypothetical "fully informed" electorate, and to compare actual voting behavior at both the individual and aggregate levesl to this hypthetical baseline. My aim in this report is to proide concrete, quantitative estimates of the effects of informationin recent US presidential elections (203).
Measures: interviewer assigned level of informed: from high to low (5 point scale). WHAT KIND OF MEASURE IS THIS?
how much influence can cues, information shortcuts and polls have on a voter's tendency to be fully informed?
many critics agree, political awareness is essential to democracy (Kinder and Palfrey 1993), where as others are content with supplying that poorly informed voters can make use of cues etc in order to participate in democracy (McKelvey & Odershoot 1985; Page & Shapiro 1992; Popkin 1991). yet no one has invested the time to come up with empirical support for either.
Understand: there is a difference between information levels, and information processing (Sniderman (1993) went as far as to say that the public is not necessarily uninformed, but instead has a thin grasp of it, rather than a thick knowledge of it, which allows for minimal coherence and reasonablyness in their thinking...but not necessarily minimal levels of information and attention).
This study rejects the theory that cues are an appropriate replacement of actual political knowledge.
Bartels creates a hypothetical “fully informed” electorate. “How might the preferences of this hypothetical “fully informed” electorate differ from the preferences of the actual electorate? One possibility is to assume that increasing information reduces the variability of voters’ choice without altering the central tendency of their underlying preferences. Alternatively, we might suppose that more informed voters are more likely across the board to prefer Republicans (or Democrats), controlling for other relevant factors. Both of these assumptions seems unduly restrictive, however, in that they require information to have essentially similar effects on all voters regardless of their circumstances. In seems much more plausible to suppose that increasing information—by giving voters a better sense of their credibility and likely consequences of some voters systematically more Republican in their preferences but at the same time make others systematically more Democratic” (205).
H: Uninformed voters successfully use cues and information shortcuts to behave as if they were fully informed. Failing that, individual deviations from fully informed voting cancels out in a mass electorate, producing the same aggregate election outcomes as if voters were fully informed.
Results: hypothesis is disconfirmed; at the individual level, the average deviation of actual vote probabilies from hypothetical “fully informed” vote probabilities was about ten percentage points. In the electorate as a whole, these deviations were significantly deluted by aggregation, but by no means eliminated: incumbent presidents did almost five percentage points btter, and democratic candidates did almost two percentage points better, than they would have if voters had in fact been “fully informed.
“Given the variety of demonstrable differences between well-informed and less well-informed citiens in sensitivity to external stimuli, diversity and precision of political perceptions, information-processing strategies, access to shared understandings of politics, and integrative ability, it hardly seems outlandish to entertain the possibility that disparities in political information lead to systematically different vote choices by citizens in otherwise similar political circumstances, despite—or perhaps even, in part because of—the availability of cues and information short-cuts…” (202).
Methods: generate “fully informed” electorate (204).
Measurement; level of political sophistication:
Interviewer assessed: .95, .8, .5, .2, .05. corresponding to very high…very low.
Findings: “relatively uninformed voters are more likely, other things being equal, to support incumbents and democrats” (218). …suggesting that political ignorance has systematic and significant political consequences (220).
With full information voters become more liberal in policy choice and more republican in vote choice.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Monday, October 1, 2007
Zaller (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
Chapter 1 The Fragmented State of Opinion Research
Independent variable: Coverage; different types include: objective news reports, partisan arguments, televised news conferences, paid advertisements.
Main ideas:
1. people differ in their habitual attention to politics and hence THEIR EXPOSURE to political information and argumentation in the media.
Chapter 3 How Citizens Acquire Information and Convert it into Public Opinion
Two important phenomena: 1.) how citizens come to learn about public matters and 2.) how they convert the information they acquire into an opinion.
Processing information: systematically thinking/processing vs. cognitive shortcuts/peripheral cues (O’Keefe 2002). OR cognitive and affective elements (Zaller).
Definitions:
Consideration: a belief concerning an object and an evaluation of that belief (40).
Persuasive Messages (41): arguments or images providing a reason for taking a position or point of view; if accepted by the individual, they become considerations.
Cueing Messages (42): consist of “contextual information;” they enable citizens to perceive relationships between the persuasive messages they receive and their political predictions, which in turn permits them to respond critically to the persuasive message. “Thus, a Republican voter will be more likely to reject a message if she/he recognizes that the person giving the message is a Democrat” (42).
Comm lit:
APPLICABILITY, ACCESSIBLE, AVAILABLE
Four AXIOMS about how individuals respond to political information they encounter:
1. RECEPTION AXIOM: the greater a person’s level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely h or she is to be exposed to and comprehend—to receive—political messages concerning that issue. This is not a general cognitive measurement. It sounds like its more of the “accessible” measurement, because it say ENGAGEMENT. Zaller defines it as a combination of affective engagement and intellectual engagement. Hmm… POLITICAL AWARENESS/sophistication: In the analysis…it is measured by means of a general measure of political knowledge (factual tests (43). It is a measure of general, chronic awareness.
2. RESISTANCE AXIOM: People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and the predispositions. The ability to resist…Inattentive people are more accepting of ideas they encounter. This brings in the idea of source credibility; see Petty & Cacioppo (1986) and Chaiken (1980). Factors they bring in: argument strength (weak vs. strong), involvement (low vs. high), and source credibility (high vs. low). “The experimental design involves two message types x two involvement conditions x two source types” (46).
3. ACCESSIBILITY AXIOM: The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.
4. RESPONSE AXIOM: Individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or accessibly to them. ACCESSIBLE.
Independent variable: Coverage; different types include: objective news reports, partisan arguments, televised news conferences, paid advertisements.
Main ideas:
1. people differ in their habitual attention to politics and hence THEIR EXPOSURE to political information and argumentation in the media.
Chapter 3 How Citizens Acquire Information and Convert it into Public Opinion
Two important phenomena: 1.) how citizens come to learn about public matters and 2.) how they convert the information they acquire into an opinion.
Processing information: systematically thinking/processing vs. cognitive shortcuts/peripheral cues (O’Keefe 2002). OR cognitive and affective elements (Zaller).
Definitions:
Consideration: a belief concerning an object and an evaluation of that belief (40).
Persuasive Messages (41): arguments or images providing a reason for taking a position or point of view; if accepted by the individual, they become considerations.
Cueing Messages (42): consist of “contextual information;” they enable citizens to perceive relationships between the persuasive messages they receive and their political predictions, which in turn permits them to respond critically to the persuasive message. “Thus, a Republican voter will be more likely to reject a message if she/he recognizes that the person giving the message is a Democrat” (42).
Comm lit:
APPLICABILITY, ACCESSIBLE, AVAILABLE
Four AXIOMS about how individuals respond to political information they encounter:
1. RECEPTION AXIOM: the greater a person’s level of cognitive engagement with an issue, the more likely h or she is to be exposed to and comprehend—to receive—political messages concerning that issue. This is not a general cognitive measurement. It sounds like its more of the “accessible” measurement, because it say ENGAGEMENT. Zaller defines it as a combination of affective engagement and intellectual engagement. Hmm… POLITICAL AWARENESS/sophistication: In the analysis…it is measured by means of a general measure of political knowledge (factual tests (43). It is a measure of general, chronic awareness.
2. RESISTANCE AXIOM: People tend to resist arguments that are inconsistent with their political predispositions, but they do so only to the extent that they possess the contextual information necessary to perceive a relationship between the message and the predispositions. The ability to resist…Inattentive people are more accepting of ideas they encounter. This brings in the idea of source credibility; see Petty & Cacioppo (1986) and Chaiken (1980). Factors they bring in: argument strength (weak vs. strong), involvement (low vs. high), and source credibility (high vs. low). “The experimental design involves two message types x two involvement conditions x two source types” (46).
3. ACCESSIBILITY AXIOM: The more recently a consideration has been called to mind or thought about, the less time it takes to retrieve that consideration or related considerations from memory and bring them to the top of the head for use.
4. RESPONSE AXIOM: Individuals answer survey questions by averaging across the considerations that are immediately salient or accessibly to them. ACCESSIBLE.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
