Bartels (1996) Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections

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.