RICE UNIVERSITY
Down-Ballot Decision Making: The Effect of Electoral Levels on Individual Cognitive Processing & Information By
Steven Perry
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
Doctor of Philosophy
APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE
Robert Stein John Alford Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Professor, Department of Political Science Science Dissertation Chair
Rick Wilson Rick Wilson (Apr 27, 2021 13:06 CDT) Rick Wilson Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Political Science Professor of Statistics and Psychology
Leonardo Duenas Osorio (Apr 29, 2021 13:40 CDT) Leonardo Duenas Osorio Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
HOUSTON, TEXAS May 2021 Abstract
Down-Ballot Decision Making: The Effect of Electoral Level on Individual
Cognitive Processing & Information Consumption
by
Steven Perry
Of the more than 500,000 elected officials nationwide, more than 96% are elected to positions in local government. As a result, each election cycle the vast majority of races on a voter’s ballot are comprised not of high profile races for well-known positions in state and federal government, but for positions in local government. Local electoral contests provide a large and diverse array of positions that are placed before the electorate; in addition to traditional legislative and executive positions, voters in state and local elections are often tasked with selecting candidates to judicial, administrative, law enforcement, and other specialized positions. Do voters use the same types of cognitive strategies when making decisions for these bottom-of-the-ballot contests that they use when evaluating candidates for more well-known offices? Little work has systematically examined the effect that different institutional electoral levels may play on a voter’s cognitive decision making processes. The implications of this research trend are clear: voters are electing the vast majority of office holders and are making the greatest number of decisions through processes that we, as scholars, know the least about. Through a series of original experiments, I identify the effect of electoral level on voters’ cognitive processing, information acquisition, and decision making. Overall, I find clear evidence of an electoral effect: in spite of significant information asymmetries and higher information costs, voters in local elections desire more information about candidates running for local office. iii
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I owe a great deal to the members of my committee for their support throughout this project and my graduate career. It is by no means an understatement to say that without the support and encouragement of my advisor, Bob
Stein, this project would not have been possible. Through his never-ending support and encouragement, he has been instrumental in my growth as a scholar. Perhaps more than any other reason, my appreciation for him can be summarized in one observation: He never told me one of my ideas was bad. This is not to suggest, of course, that none of my ideas were actually bad; quite the opposite in fact! Instead, he has always understood the need for me to grow and develop as a person and a scholar, refining my own bad ideas into unique arguments and perspectives. This dissertation is the direct result of the growth and exploration of those bad ideas. No student could ask for a better mentor or advisor.
My deepest thanks also to the other members of my committee: My thanks to Rick
Wilson, who forced me to grow and develop as a scholar and taught me the power of experimental analysis, John Alford, who showed me both on how to focus on the big- picture questions of scholarship and how to truly be an effective teacher, and Leonardo
Duenas Osorio, who was the first scholar to truly treat me as a colleague.
I also owe considerable thanks and appreciation to the faculty of Rice’s Political
Science Department, who each in their own way provided insights and encouragement throughout my graduate career. In particular, I owe special thanks to Keith Hamm,
Matthew Hayes, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, and Randy Stevenson for their guidance and support. iv
I would also be remiss if I did not thank the professors at Sam Houston State
University, who mentored and motivated me to pursue political science as a career. In particular, I am eternally grateful for the guidance and support of Stacy Ulbig, who first introduced me to the wonders of research, encouraged me to go to graduate school, and was instrumental in guiding me to where I am today. Without her advice and support, I never could have come so far.
There are many other scholars from outside the realm of Political Science who have enriched my Rice experience. I owe a great deal of thanks to Jennifer Wilson for her empathy, guidance, support, and for being the best director anyone could ask for. I am also deeply indebted to Alan Steinberg for his friendship and mentorship, Paul Treacy for his support and encouragement, and to the dynamic duo of Kyung-Hee Bae and Elizabeth
Festa for their support, humor, and always entertaining perspectives.
I will also be forever grateful for my colleagues and fellow graduate students for their endless humor, encouragement, and general mutual commiseration throughout the trials and tribulations of grad school. The camaraderie with my fellow students was without a doubt the most enjoyable part of this experience. In particular, I owe more than can be expressed to my coauthor, office mate, and friend Matt Lamb for his constant support over the past six years. From trying to complete our math camp problem sets, to publishing our first article together, and complaining about having to actually write our dissertations, he has been a constant source of insight, advice, encouragement, constructive criticism, and friendly banter. I still maintain, however, that if academia doesn’t work out for us, we should start our own webcomic (even though neither of us v can actually draw). I wish him nothing but the best, and look forward to continuing our work together.
I would also like to express my sincere thanks to the other political science graduate students, who each in their own way encouraged and supported me throughout my graduate career. In particular, I owe special thanks to (in no particular order) Andrew
Wood, Agustina Jaime, Maria Aroca, Santiago Sosa, Carly Mayes, Liana Reyes-Reardon, and Kaitlin Senk for their friendship, advice, and camaraderie.
I am also extremely grateful to my family for the love and encouragement they have shown throughout this process. First, I am so thankful to my parents for their love and support, for teaching me the value of learning, and letting me build my argumentative and rhetorical skills at the cost of their peace and quiet. I am also so thankful for my brother Brandon, who is constantly teaching me to never take myself too seriously.
Last, and most importantly, I must express my deepest gratitude to my wife Stori.
More than anyone else, she has provided unending patience and encouragement that has been vital to my success. During my time in graduate school, she has willingly and consistently sacrificed her own comfort and convenience so that I could pursue my PhD.
In addition to just putting up with me day in and day out (which, in and of itself is a task of
Herculean proportions), over the past six years she has served as a companion, friend, copy editor, student, teacher, problem solver, therapist, experimental lab rat, stand-up comedian, study-buddy, and practice panel audience. I cannot begin to express how grateful I am for her love and support.
I thank you all. vi
“All politics is local”
~Speaker Tip O’Neill (commonly attributed)
“Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not
from some farcical aquatic ceremony!”
~Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Table of Contents
Abstract ...... i
Acknowledgements ...... iii
Table of Contents ...... vii
List of Tables ...... x
List of Figures ...... xi
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Down-ballot Decision Making ...... 1
I. Down-ballot Decision Making: ...... 2
II. What Exactly is Local Government? ...... 5
III. The Importance of Studying Local Elections ...... 6
IV. Confronting the Down-ballot Dilemma: ...... 10
V. Organization of the Dissertation: ...... 11
Chapter 2: How Voters Make Decisions: The Role of Cognitive Processing and
Information Consideration ...... 13
I. Introduction ...... 14
II. The Role of Information...... 15
III. Cognitive Strategies and Shortcuts ...... 18
IV. A Strategic Model of Decision Making ...... 23 viii
V. The Mediating Effect of Electoral Level ...... 26
Chapter 3: No Results Found: Examining Information Asymmetries Across Electoral
Contexts ...... 33
I. Introduction ...... 34
II. The Effect of Electoral Level on Information Availability ...... 36
III. Candidate Information & Online Searches ...... 43
IV. Examining Candidate Online Information: Aggregate Data Collection & Results . 46
V. Measuring Voter Online Search Behavior: Experimental Design & Results ...... 57
VI. Concluding Remarks ...... 66
Chapter 4: Examining Descriptive Differences in Decision Making Across Electoral
Contexts ...... 67
I. Introduction ...... 68
II. Why Electoral Environments Matter: Information & Motivation ...... 69
III. Experiment 1: Tradeoffs between Information Acquisition and Heuristic Use ...... 75
IV. Experiment 2: Analyzing the Type and Amount of Information Consumed ...... 84
V. Conclusion ...... 92
Chapter 5: Candidates and Information Complexity: Examining the Effects of
Information Cost and Magnitude on Voter Decision Making ...... 94
I. Introduction ...... 95
II. Examining Differences in Costs and Information Magnitude ...... 96 ix
III. Experimental Methods and Measures ...... 100
IV. The Effect of Electoral Levels on Total Amount of Information Accessed ...... 107
V. Unpacking the Most Important Issues ...... 115
VI. Conclusion ...... 120
Chapter 6: The Down-Ballot Dilemma ...... 121
The Down-Ballot Dilemma ...... 122
Exploring the Down-Ballot: Building an Agenda for Future Research ...... 126
References ...... 130
Appendices ...... 141
Chapter 3 Appendix ...... 141
Chapter 4 Appendix ...... 142
Chapter 5 Appendix ...... 147
x
List of Tables
Table 3. 1: Number of Local Candidates Included in Sample by Office ...... 49
Table 3. 2: Difference Between Domain and Content Items for Local and Congressional
Candidates ...... 52
Table 3. 3: Difference Between Domain and Content Items for City Council and
Congressional Candidates ...... 57
Table 3. 4: Linear Robustness Checks of the Effect of Electoral Level on Search
Difficulty, Amount of Information, and Search Quality ...... 63
Table 4. 1: Multivariate Logistic Regression Robustness Checks ...... 83
Table 4. 2: Amount of Information Accessed Robustness Checks ...... 91
Table 5. 1: The Effect of Electoral Level on Voter Information Environments ...... 97
Table 5. 2: Amount of Information Accessed Robustness Checks ...... 109
Table 5. 3: Multivariate Effects of Information Costs and Magnitude ...... 113
Table 5. 4: Mediating Effects of Electoral Level, Information Costs, and Magnitude ... 115
Table 5. 5: Most Important Information Items ...... 117
xi
List of Figures
Figure 2. 1: Model of Dynamic Cognitive Information Processing ...... 24
Figure 2. 2: Mediated Model of Environmental Effects on Information Processing ...... 27
Figure 3. 1: Difference in the Likelihood of Using Web Domain by Candidate Level ...... 53
Figure 3. 2: Difference in the Likelihood of Using a Content Term by Level of Candidate ...... 55
Figure 3. 3: Effect of Electoral Level on the Perceived Difficulty of Information Search ...... 60
Figure 3. 4: Effect of Electoral Level on the Amount of Information Found ...... 62
Figure 3. 5: Effect of Electoral Level on Comparative Search Quality ...... 62
Figure 3. 6: Effect of Electoral Level on the Probability of Finding Information ...... 65
Figure 4.1: Experiment 1 Local Treatment Condition ...... 77
Figure 4.2: Experiment 1 Congressional Treatment Condition ...... 77
Figure 4. 3: Probability of Acquiring Information & Using Heuristics ...... 80
Figure 4. 4: Most Important Links by Treatment Condition ...... 82
Figure 4. 5: Experiment 2 Local Treatment Condition...... 85
Figure 4. 6: Experiment 2 Congressional Treatment Condition ...... 86
Figure 4. 7: Experiment 2 Information Board ...... 87
Figure 4. 8: Effect of Level of Office on Information Acquisition ...... 89
Figure 4. 9: Electoral Level on Detailed Information Searches ...... 92
Figure 5. 1: Local Candidate Treatment ...... 102
Figure 5. 2: Congressional Candidate Treatment ...... 102
Figure 5. 3: Interactive Information Board ...... 104
Figure 5. 4: Sample Information Item ...... 104
Figure 5. 5: Sample Missing Information Item ...... 106
Figure 5. 6: Effect of Electoral Level on Amount of Information Accessed ...... 107
Figure 5. 7: Probability of Accessing Information Item by Cognitive Requirement ...... 110 xii
Figure 5. 8: Differences in the Likelihood of Accessing Information ...... 111
Figure 5. 9: Effect of Information Costs & Magnitude ...... 112
Figure 5. 10: Most Important Information Items ...... 118
Figure 5. 11: Top 5 Most Important Information Items ...... 119
1
Chapter 1: An Introduction to Down-ballot Decision Making
2
I. Down-ballot Decision Making: When Houston voters went to the polls in November of 2020, they confronted a highly contentious and polarizing presidential contest at the top of their ballot. On the bottom of their ballot, almost 100 races later, voters had to make important choices in little-known municipal races, seats on local boards and commissions, and positions as area school trustees. In between, dozens of contests selecting congressional representatives, state legislators, district judges, county attorneys, sheriffs, district attorneys, tax assessors, clerks, constables, city councilors, mayors, and commissioners crowd both the ballot and voter’s attention. While the presidential contest dominated both mass media attention and the public discourse, it was far from the only important decisions voters would have to make in the voting booth. How do voters cognitively adapt to these different types of decisions they encounter each time they are handed a ballot?
The experience of these 2020 voters is not unique: If you spent one minute investigating each elected official in the United States, it would take almost a full year of non-stop research; between federal, state, and local governments, American voters regularly elect more than 500,000 candidates to offices nationwide. As a result, when entering the polls on Election Day, voters are not tasked only with selecting candidates in a small number of important and highly-visible races. Instead, voters are often confronted with the burden of making choices in dozens of little-known down-ballot electoral contests.
How do voters actually make decisions in these little-known races with often-unknown candidates? Do voters use the same types of cognitive strategies when making decisions for these down-ballot contests that they use when evaluating candidates for offices at higher levels of government? How do the institutions and characteristics traditionally 3 present in local government affect individual decision making, cognitive processing, and information consumption?
When faced with a decision task, such as which candidate to vote for in an election, voters can pursue specific types of cognitive strategies, such as acquiring and processing detailed information, or relying on heuristics. While researchers from both psychology and political science have examined voter’s information processing behavior and heuristic use in political decision making, little work has systematically examined the effect that different institutional electoral levels may play in this process. Moreover, the lack of analysis on the effect of electoral settings on information processing is particularly concerning given the sheer number officials and offices that are elected in down-ballot races. In the U.S., local governments comprise more than 99.9% of all governing entities, and 96.2% of all elected officials are elected to positions in local government (Hogue, 2013; Marschall,
2010). However, our understanding of the process of voter information acquisition and consideration across different institutional electoral levels and positions is significantly underdeveloped. While some scholars have attempted to examine the role of information and cognitive processing in federal campaigns, little work has examined how the features and characteristics of local elections can mitigate individual decision making. The implications of this research trend are clear: voters are electing the vast majority of office holders and are making the greatest number of decisions through processes that we, as scholars, know the least about.
In this dissertation, I argue that framing political tasks inside of the context of local government can change the individual decision making environment sufficiently to alter the strategic cognitive processes voters use when making decisions. The characteristics 4 present in conditions or decision frames of local government can alter many elements of the cognitive process, including the magnitude and complexity of the decision environment, the saliency of affective judgements, and the perceived efficacy or importance of the decision task. As a result, in addition to providing a larger and more nuanced arena for examining voter decision making, the institutions and environments present in local government can provide significant theoretical insights not found in studies of behavior on national political issues.
In this dissertation, I seek to examine how the institutions and environments traditionally present in local government affect individual information consumption, cognitive processing, and decision making. Specifically, using both aggregate and experimental methods, I examine three key questions about how voters acquire information and make cognitive decisions about the candidates on the bottom of their ballot:
1) What barriers do voters encounter when trying to become informed about
candidates running in their local races?
2) What factors affect the process through which voters seek information when
making decisions among candidates for different offices at different levels of
government?
3) How do changes in the magnitude and complexity of available information mediate
the effect of electoral level on a voter’s need for information acquisition?
This research is an important first step in quantifying how meaningful differences in the cost, availability, and complexity of information about candidates seeking office at different electoral levels can have a significant effect on voter decision making. By better 5 understanding this process, we gain significant insight on how voters make important decisions about the vast majority of candidates on their ballot.
II. What Exactly is Local Government? Before fully examining the characteristics that make local government unique, I must first clarify a few terms. Following the example of a long line of scholars, throughout this dissertation I will refer to the concepts of local government and local elections. In reality, however, no such unit of government actually exists. As a term, local government has historically been used as an artificial conglomeration of thousands of different institutions, each with their own rules and systems of government, from across the fifty states. These governments can have dramatically different governing arrangements, regulations, requirements, and standard operating procedures. While such dramatic institutional variation necessarily complicates the study of local government, it also provides a rich community ripe for scholarly exploration and analysis.
Nevertheless, for the purposes of this project local government will refer to any unit of government below the state level, including county governments, municipal or city government, and special districts, such as school districts. Similarly, local elections will refer to any election to elect officials to fill positions in these institutions.
Such a simplistic conceptualization of so many different and unique institutions necessarily minimizes a substantial amount of intergovernmental variation.
Conceptualizing local government as a ‘one size fits all’ definition equalizes the municipal structures of New York City, Chicago, and Houston with those found in the thriving metropolis of Lost Springs, Wyoming (2010 census population: 4), which reduces a substantial amount of institutional diversity. I, however, like many scholars before me 6 trade the uniqueness of these institutions for conceptual simplicity, and classify all local governments under the same term.1
III. The Importance of Studying Local Elections Before diving into a deeper discussion of theory, literature, and data, I wish to make the first, and potentially most important, argument of this dissertation: studying local elections is both important and deserving of serious scholarly attention. Three key observations lead me to such a conclusion: the sheer number of officials elected to positions in local government, the importance these officials play in our governing system, and the unique effect local elections have on voter decision making that cannot be explained by elections at other electoral levels.
The vast majority of officials elected nationwide are chosen to fill positions in local government. From a scholarly perspective, it therefore seems necessary that if we desire to understand the process by which voters acquire and consider information before making their voting decision, we must explore the nuances of cognitive processing and decision making in areas where voters are making the greatest number of decisions.
While understanding voter decision making for presidential and congressional offices is without a doubt important, it can only tell us so much about how voters select the vast army of elected officials doing the majority of governing. Unfortunately, the nuances of local voter decision making have not received a substantial amount of needed scholarly attention.
1 For suggestions on studying how voter decision making differs across these institutional settings, please see the future research section of Chapter 6. 7
For example, consider research on federal voting behavior: It is not a controversial statement to say that for the past 60 years, the field of American politics has considered explaining voting choice as the holy grail of scholarly research. During that time, generations of scholars have sought to examine the nuances that affect how voters select their candidate of choice. Without question, this stream of research has been quite productive, and has identified a vast multitude of factors that affect individual vote choice, ranging from classical explanations of rational policy benefit (Downs, 1957), psychological partisan attachment (Cambell et al, 1960), family and group association (Berelson et al,
1954), and demographic resources (Verba & Nie, 1972) to more contemporary insights of the effects of genetics (Fowler & Dawes, 2008), habitual behavior (Gerber, Green &
Shachar, 2003), mass polarization (Abramowitz, 2010), mobilization (Bergan et al, 2005), and media exposure (Ksiazek et al, 2019), along with many, many others. Few studies, however, specifically examine how these characteristics affect voters participating in local elections.
This is, of course, not to suggest that no one has studied local politics or local elections. Some of the most influential work in the discipline has explored the features and characteristics of local government. For example, Dahl’s (1962) classic analysis of the source of political power is at its core a detailed case study of the local government of New Haven, Connecticut. Similarly, a number of scholars of urban politics have examined many important characteristics of local government, such as local policymaking, distributive and redistributive policies, and municipal service provision.
Unfortunately, however, scholarly exploration on local government and political decision making are informative, but siloed, with few scholars attempting to combine the 8 insights on voter decision making and environment of local elections. As a result, we have little empirical understanding of the cognitive processes voters use when attempting to complete this substantial portion of their ballot.
In addition to electing a significant number of candidates to office, local governments play an important role in both governing and service provision. In total, more than 90,000 local governments exist across the United States. These governments, which include towns, counties, municipalities, and special districts, are responsible for the delivery of a wide range of public services and utilize a substantial amount of resources.
In 2018, for example, local governments alone had an estimated revenue of $2.01 trillion
(US Census, 2019), an amount some $711 million more than total congressional discretionary spending in the same fiscal year (CBO, 2019).
Local governments use these vast funds to provide for many vital community services (Urban Institute, 2011). Nationwide, cities, counties, and special districts are directly responsible for direct service provision for a significant number of different policy areas. These governments provide education services both in the form of public primary and secondary schools, as well as operating local community colleges. In addition, municipal governments provide vital services such as police and fire protection, water services, garbage collection, and maintain sewer and sanitation systems. Local governments also have significant responsibilities for street quality and potholes, as well as providing for neighborhood parks, public pools, and other community amenities.
Finally, cities are responsible for a substantial number of regulatory policies, including municipal ordinances and zoning regulations. 9
Perhaps more than at any other level of government, municipal policymaking primarily revolves around dedication of scarce fiscal and political resources into provision of specific services. Local elected officials play a vital role in the allocation of city funds to services and community programs, as well as determining where scarce fiscal resources are devoted. As Kweit and Kweit (1999) summarize:
“…local governments must ensure the health and safety of residents, so it
established a police force or a fire department or contracts with other
governments to provide those services. In addition to those basic policies,
individual local governments must determine if they will devote resources
to redevelop the downtown into a thriving mecca for business or if they will
build low-cost housing for poor residents. Should they focus on brick-and-
mortar kinds of efforts-such as building a new events center- or should they
devote their efforts to policies that will directly benefit residents in their daily
lives…? Such programs are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but given
the limited fiscal resources of many local governments, decision makers
must often choose between competing claims for limited funds.” (7)
Given the substantial number of candidates elected to positions in local government, and the significant role they play in determining policy, it is important to understand how voters make decisions about their preferred candidate in down-ballot races. However, the lack of scholarly examination of voter decision making in conditions of local government significantly hampers this effort. Importantly, it is of little use to attempt to equate voter decision process for well-known and well-known candidates seeking positions at the top of the ballot to those used to identify a candidate of choice in 10 a local race. As will be explored in detail in the succeeding chapters, there is a dramatic difference in the political, institutional, and electoral environments found in conditions of local government. Dramatic differences in media attention, perceived importance, and the cost and magnitude of available information creates a substantially different decision making environment for local elections that is not mirrored for top of the ballot contests.
Critically, this is not a methodological argument. I am not posing that local elections are important solely because of the methodological advances to be found by increasing the number of observations of candidates we can analyze while seeking office. Instead, the unique nature of these races provides a rich ground for exploring decision making in a wholly novel setting. While it is certainly true that voters are making many more decisions when selecting local candidates, they are critically making different types of decisions that rely on different cognitive strategies, different types and amounts of information, and are making such decisions in very different cognitive environments.
IV. Confronting the Down-ballot Dilemma: In the following chapters, I empirically quantify the effect framing voters’ decisions in the context and environment of local government has on voter decision making. From these studies, two clear trends emerge:
1) The cost of acquiring information about candidates running for local office is
significantly higher than for other candidates.
2) Voters desire the greatest amount of information about candidates running for
local office.
The implications of these findings result in a clear down-ballot dilemma: Voters seek the most information about candidates running in races that have the highest information 11 costs. This is dramatically different than the traditional cognitive influences voters face when considering well-known candidates, about which an abundance of information is available.
V. Organization of the Dissertation: The remainder of this dissertation is organized as follows:
In chapter 2, I synthesize the current scholarly understanding of the cognitive tools and processes voters use when making decisions about their candidate of choice, and identify how the features and characteristics of local elections can cause voters to use different types of information acquisition strategies.
In chapter 3, I quantitatively examine the burden voters face when trying to learn important information about the candidates on their ballot. In one of the first works of its kind, I use an experiment as well as aggregate analysis of more than 20,000 Google web links to identify that voters face substantial burdens when trying to obtain information about their local candidates for office.
In chapter 4, I examine how differences in the electoral level of the office being sought by a candidate can have a dramatic effect on voter information search behavior.
Holding all else constant, I find significant evidence that voters use different types of cognitive search strategies to acquire information about local candidates than they use when acquiring information for candidates at other electoral levels. Through two original experiments that allow voters to indicate the amount and type of information they would acquire about candidates from different electoral levels, I identify significant electoral differences: When provided the opportunity to gain information about a local candidate, 12 voters seek a greater amount of information, and are more likely to seek information requiring higher levels of cognitive consideration.
In chapter 5, I extend my analysis on the role of electoral level in voter cognitive processing by recognizing that, across electoral levels, all characteristics and circumstances are not equal. Instead, features of the electoral and institutional environment can create dramatically different cognitive settings in which voters must make decisions. In this chapter, I seek to examine how changes in the electoral environment, such as the cost of information or the existence of previously known information, mediate the effect of electoral level on voter information acquisition.
Finally, in chapter 6, I address how the implications of my empirical findings result in a novel problem facing voters in local elections: According to this down-ballot dilemma, voters desire the most information about candidates running in races which have the greatest information costs. This dilemma has profound implications for our understanding of the ways in which voters acquire and cognitive process information about candidates for public office, as well as normative implications about mechanisms to improve voter knowledge and engagement with down-ballot candidates. 13
Chapter 2: How Voters Make Decisions: The Role of Cognitive Processing and Information Consideration
14
I. Introduction Citizens are constantly asked to make decisions about politics: Whether going to the polls, evaluating issues, or having a politically orientated conversation with family and friends, citizens are routinely asked to express political decisions on a wide-ranging spectrum of political attitudes and behaviors. As a result, political science has seen a growing recognition for the importance of studying and understanding the process through which voters make decisions.
Consider, for example, the number of decisions and the amount of information required for an individual to engage in even the most basic of political tasks. There are a multitude of decisions that must occur in a voter’s mind between learning about an election and acquiring their coveted ‘I Voted’ stickers. Even before confronting a ballot, individuals must first consciously decide to engage with the political process and decide if they are willing to bear the information cost necessary to vote, such as acquiring details on polling locations and registration requirements. Next, they must consider how candidates align with the politics, issues or positions they find important. When finally inside the ballot booth, voters are confronted with even more decisions, manifesting as a long list of offices for which to select candidates. While some of these top of the ballot races contain popular candidates with high levels of name recognition, the vast majority of local or down-ballot races have candidates with little publicity or name recognition.
While examining a voter’s decisions on each of the races on a ballot can provide some key insights into individual political behavior, understanding the process through which voters arrive at decisions is both a more fruitful and theoretically enriching endeavor. I argue that the process through which individuals arrive at a decision is just as important to understanding how citizens engage in politics as the citizens’ decision 15 itself. As making political decisions is a necessary condition for political engagement, understanding individual political decision making is fundamental to understanding the relationship between citizens and politics. From this perspective, understanding how voters seek out and consider information, process details, and draw affective judgments in order to make decisions can explain greater levels of individual behavior than models that rely solely on traditional individual, candidate, or campaign characteristics.
In this chapter, I explore and analyze current scholarship on the cognitive process individuals use when faced with a voting decision task. First, I identity the role of information in making political decisions. Second, I analyze the different cognitive strategies and information shortcuts voters can use to limit the amount of formal information acquisition required to make voting decisions. Finally, I explore how the environments of local elections can mediate the type of cognitive strategies voters use.
II. The Role of Information Scholars have long recognized that individuals do not make decisions inside an idiosyncratic vacuum. Instead, individuals make decisions through strategic processes inside of specific cognitive and environmental contexts. As a result, even under conditions of fixed preferences, changes in cognitive or environmental decision conditions can have a substantive and important effect on individual decision outcomes.
One of the most well recognized elements of the cognitive process concerns information. Normatively, there is a longstanding view among both scholars and democratic theorists that information and political knowledge are necessary conditions for the adequate functioning of representative democratic government (Verba & Nie,
1972; Zaller, 1992; Rosenstone & Hansen, 1992; Verba et a1., 1993; Delli Carpini & 16
Keeter, 1996). Writings from institutional framers, including Jefferson and Madison, make numerous references to the virtues (and necessity) of a well-informed citizenry. Almost universally, as Kukliski and Quirk (2000) observe, “the notion of a competent citizenry is normatively attractive” for any system of government that purports to be ‘of, by, and for the people.’
It is also near universally recognized that this idealized image of voters as systematic information consumers that intensely study issues and scrutinize policy alternatives before arriving at a conclusion is far from the reality of most voters’ behavior.
A long line of empirical research has provided a near-universal result: on average, members of the public have consistently low levels of political information (Jennings,
1996; Alvarez, 1997; Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1997; Galston, 2001; Popkin & Dimock, 2010;
Lupia, 2015). As a result of this apparent contradiction, many scholars have sought to examine how individuals utilize information to make effective decisions. It has been well documented that when making political decisions, voters face two contrasting motivations: “the desire to make a good decision and the desire to make an easy decision”
(Lau & Redlawsk, 2006, 14; Stroh, 1995; Lau, 2003; Redlawsk, 2004). As a result, voters must consciously weigh the amount of information they deem necessary to make an accurate decision against the cost of acquiring that information.
The cognitive benefits of information are well established. When making important decisions, such as during a campaign, information allows voters to make more effective choices in line with their interests (Areneaux, 2006) as well as provide them the resources to draw evaluations between contrasting candidates or positions (Markus & Converse,
1979). When in possession of full information, citizens can engage in complete 17 synthetization of data and make comprehensive evaluations of candidates or issues in order to make decisions in line with their preferences. As Lupia (1992) notes, information plays an important role in the individual voter’s decision making process; in the absence of complete information, “voters may cast a different vote than they would have cast if they has possessed better (or complete) information” (390). When provided with inaccurate details or outright misinformation, however, voters may act in ways that significantly harm democratic legitimacy and representative government (Hochschild and
Einstein, 2015).
A wide range of empirical scholarship has consistently demonstrated the important role information plays in decision making, particularly for voters. In lab experiments, formal models, and game theoretic tasks, for example, the presence or absence of information can dramatically affect vote choice (Harsanyi, 1973; Radner & Rosenthal,
1982; Morton & Williams, 1999; Goeree, Holt & Palfrey, 2005; Bassi, Mortin, & Williams,
2011). Similarly, information plays a critical role on models of strategic voting, as voters use information about a candidate’s policy position and prior polling performance to engage in strategic candidate selection (Cox, 1997). Aggregate data has also revealed the same trend: For example, information and saliency can have a substantial effect on voter decisions on public referendum and ballot initiatives (Hobolt, 2005). Moreover, in sequential primaries, such as used in the presidential nominating system, voters can draw meaningful inferences from a candidate’s performance in prior primary contests (Morton
& Williams, 1999). Key to this process is the ability of information to clarify potential outcomes and reduce the risk voters face when making a decision; as Hobolt (2005) 18 notes, information plays a vital role in reducing voter uncertainty, as “additional information enables individuals to become increasingly certain in their opinions.” (87)
In addition to recognizing the benefits of information, significant scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding how individuals cognitively process information into useful considerations for decision-making. For many scholars, including Watts and
McGuire (1964), Graber (1984), Hastie and Park (1986), and Lodge et al. (1995), voters process information through an on-line tally; instead of recording details for future consideration, individuals use encountered information considerations in a quasi-
Bayesian process to update their prior attitude on an issue. After information is processed and the tally is updated, the specific information detail is discarded. Other scholars, however, argue that individual information consumption is primarily memory based
(Kelley & Mirer, 1974; Zaller, 1992; Zaller & Fledman, 1992). When encountering new information on a specific attitude, individuals do not process the specific details contained in the consideration; instead, the information is stored in memory and is only evaluated later when the individual is required to make a decision on the affected attitude. Both of these perspectives, however, recognize the importance of information in determining an individual’s ultimate decision outcome.
III. Cognitive Strategies and Shortcuts While there is little doubt that information can be useful, acquiring and processing such information can be quite costly. To do so effectively requires significant levels of cognitive ability. Building on insights from the cognitive processing literature, it is apparent that to make perfectly informed decisions and effectively connect candidate perceptions and positions into a unidimensional space necessary to draw intra-candidate 19 comparisons, voters require significant cognitive attention and resources (Lutopn et al,
2015; Jewitt & Goren, 2016).
In order to prevent having to bear the high cost of formal information consideration, voters have a series of other cognitive strategies available to them to aid decision making
(Lupia & McCubbins, 1998). These include using heuristics or information shortcuts, relying on pre-cognitive affective judgements, and limiting information consideration through motivated reasoning.
To mitigate the high cost of formal information consideration, voters can use heuristics as a shortcut to reduce information costs, cognitive processing requirements, and the complexity of the cognitive decision-making environment (Tversky & Kahneman,
1972; 1973; 1974; Rosch, 1978; Lau & Redlawsk, 1997; 2006). Heuristics allow voters with incomplete information to use shortcuts, such as an endorsement or a party’s position on an issue, to draw inferences, develop attitudes, and make conclusions about issues without engaging in high levels of systematic information acquisition or processing
(Arceneaux & Kolodny, 2009).
Empirical research on heuristic use has been quite fruitful. Many different scholars have found that in general, effective heuristic use increases the ability of voters to cast an accurate vote. (Lau & Redlawsk, 1997; 2006) One of the most commonly recognized and studied heuristics is the categorization or representation heuristic. This heuristic allows actors to categorize a new object as an additional instance or component of a familiar group (Tversky & Kahneman, 1972; 1973; 1974; Rosch, 1978; Lau & Redlawsk,
2006). 20
As a classification heuristic, party identification allows voters to equate a candidate, of which the voter has little to no information, to a larger party on which the voter has a preexisting affective judgement. Empirical analysis of political heuristic use has almost universally recognized the importance of party identification and ideology as an informational heuristic that affects voting behavior (Lodge & Hamill, 1986; Squire &
Smith, 1988; Convoer & Feldman, 1989; Rahn, 1993; Lau & Redlawsk, 2001; Schaffner
& Streb, 2002). Collectively, many scholars have found that voters, when knowledgeable about a candidate’s political identification or ideology, can draw meaningful inferences about the candidates’ positions on a variety of political issues.
In addition, a large literature has examined the effect of candidate appearance as a heuristic for voter evaluation. This literature has produced a near universal finding: candidate appearance can significantly affect individual voter decision making (Todorov et al. 2005; Ahler et al, 2017). By viewing candidate images, voters are exposed to a wide range of information that can effect decision making, including beauty and attractiveness
(Rosar et al., 2008; King & Leigh, 2009; Berggren et al., 2010, Lawson et al., 2010) demographic information (McDermott, 1997) and other heuristically processed information (Banducci et al., 2008). Perhaps most importantly, voters are able to draw judgements of a candidates competence from image stimuli (Todorov et al., 2005; Ballew
& Todorov, 2007; Atkinson et al., 2009; Hall et al., 2009; Lawson et al., 2010; Olivola &
Todorov, 2010; Spezio et al., 2012). In an almost instantaneous process, voters heuristically process image stimuli and make judgements on competence, perceived sophistication, qualification for office, and likelihood of electoral victory. 21
In addition to heuristics, voters can lessen the impact of information costs by relying on affective, rather than cognitive, attachments. These types of judgements allow voters to draw psychologically-motivated emotional attachments to candidates or issues without engaging is high levels of systematic information processing. As Rahn (2000) argues, these affective or emotional judgements “affect political reasoning and facilitate low-information rationality” by helping inform individuals about political phenomena (130).
From this perspective, affective attachments can serve as a substitute for detailed information acquisition or other forms of costly cognitive activity (Marcus & MacKuen,
1993; Sniderman et al, 1991).
Finally, in addition to heuristics and affective judgements, voters may lower the cost of information consideration by filtering the types of information they encounter.
Empirically, there is a significant amount of literature that indicates that voters do not consume all information equally; instead, voters engage in motivated reasoning processes to only be exposed to information favorable to their political attitudes. Building on foundational work by Festinger (1957) on cognitive dissonance theory, scholars such as Zaller (1992), Lodge and Taber (2000, 2006), Druckman and Bolsen (2011), Hart and
Nisbet (2012), Bisgaard (2015), Enns and McAcoy (2012), Kopko et al (2011), and Gaines et al (2007) have each independently found evidence that voters engage in specific information search behaviors to confirm their previously held beliefs. Thus, in the words of Taber and Lodge (2006), citizens are “biased information processors.”
In this process, citizens have two cognitive goals: accuracy goals, which motivate them to seek out and consider important and informative evidence in order to reach a correct decision, and partisan goals, which motivate them to utilize reasoning in defense 22 of a prior held belief. For Taber and Lodge, partisan goals result in selective information acquisition that are driven by an automatic affective process that has both a direction and strength of bias; this “hot cognition” process motivate partisan goals that drive normatively unbiased information processing into selectively biased processing (Taber & Lodge 2005;
Lodge & Taber, 2006). This produces two types of biases: a disconfirmation bias, where voters counter arguments to the contrary of their held positions while uncritically accepting supportive arguments, and a confirmation bias, where voters self-select into arguments that are supportive of their position.
Empirically, the process of motivated reasoning has been shown to effect information consumption on a wide range of issues, including the formation of new attitudes (Druckman & Bolsen, 2011), perceptions of the Iraq War (Gains et al. 2007), attitudes on climate change (Hart & Nisbet, 2012), economic perceptions (Enns and
McAcoy, 2012; Bisgaard, 2015), the use of political heuristics (Peteren et al,, 2013), and even how ballot counters behave during election recounts (Kopko et al, 2011).
As a result, it is clear that voters can strategically collect and synthesize information through cognitive processes designed to improve decision making. However, it is also readily apparent that other individual and environmental factors can affect that process: Individuals can respond to environmental conditions such as high information costs, cognitive complexity, or other barriers to cognitive inference through a series of adaptive strategies, including the use of heuristics, affective judgements, and motivated reasoning. As these tools are a direct and strategic response to environmental conditions, I argue that factors that change the cognitive decision environment, such as 23 differences between frames of political engagement across institutional federal electoral levels, can have a significant impact on individual decision making processes.
IV. A Strategic Model of Decision Making How then do voters select from amongst the different cognitive tools available to them when making a decision? A long line of scholars have recognized that the act of seeking out and acquiring information is a deliberate behavior, and can thus be studied as a strategic action (Herstein, 1981; Riggle & Johnson, 1996; Huang & Price, 2001;
Feddersen & Sandroni, 2006). Building on this paradigm, I present a simplified five-stage model of a voter’s cognitive decision making process in Figure 2.1. In the first stage, a voter is faced with a decision task, such as which candidate to support in an election. In the second stage, the voter’s cognitive process is activated, requiring, in the third stage, voters to select a cognitive strategy (or set of cognitive strategies) to use when making the decision. These strategies could take the form of formal information acquisition and consideration, or of a number of information shortcuts including heuristic use, motivated reasoning, or relying on pre-cognitive affective judgements. In the fourth stage, the chosen strategy or set of strategies are implemented, leading in the final stage to the voter’s ultimate decision.
From this model, it is clear that the specific cognitive tools to employ in any given decision task are chosen dynamically rather than remaining constant across all decisions.
However, I am not claiming that this process is actually maximally rational or even explicitly cognitive; voters may not regularly formally consider which type of information processing strategy to use. Instead, the decision of which cognitive strategy to use may be affective or otherwise pre-cognitive, or could come after an intensive evaluation of the 24 merits of each alternative. Such a decision is also likely to vary widely across individuals, and each individual likely has idiosyncratic preferences to favor some strategies over others.
Figure 2. 1: Model of Dynamic Cognitive Information Processing
How then do voters select which types of cognitive strategies to employ for any given decision task? To gain a greater understanding of this process, I model this decision of a quasi-strategic choice selection task, under the assumption that voters are minimally cognitively rational.2 First, we can conceptualize a series of cognitive processing strategies that exist as elements of a vector S, such that:
푆푛 = (푠1, 푠2, 푠3, 푠4, … 푠푛) (1)
Second, because acquiring information regardless of method always entail some costs and may result in an uncertain benefit, I assume that all potential cognitive processing strategies have real non-zero costs as well as benefits that may be either positive or zero:
퐶푠푛 > 0 (2)
퐵푠푛 ≥ 0 (3)
Thus, for each element of Sn, voter i has idiosyncratic utility that is a combination of the costs of a cognitive strategy and the benefits provided by the strategy, such that:
2 I am certainly not the first to attempt to model the section of information as a formal strategic process. However, most scholars have used traditional rational agent modeling to model these types of processes, which require a series of strong rational assumptions about citizen behavior and cognitive ability. In order to relax these assumptions (and in line with empirical findings from psychology about how information is actually processed) I use a different modeling strategy. 25
( ) 푈푖 푆푛 = (퐵푠푖 − 퐶푠푖) (4)
Each voter has a probability of using cognitive processing strategy (or a collection of strategies) that is a function of their utility, such that cognitive sets with a positive utility
(or those where the benefit of the information obtained using the set is greater than the cost of obtaining it) have a probability bound between 0 and 1, while those with a negative or zero utility (where the cost outweighs the benefits) have no probability of being used:
(0,1) 푖푓 푈푖(푆푛) > 0 푝(퐴푆푛 |푈푖(푆푛)) { (5) 0 푖푓 푈푖(푆푛) ≤ 0
Finally, I use a weak maximization assumption to model a voter’s probability of using a specific cognitive processing set. This assumption dictates that cognitive sets with the greatest utility have the greatest probability of being used.
푈푖(푆푛) → ∞, 푝(퐴푆푛|푈푖(푆푛)) → 1 (6)
Note however that this is not a pure transitive assumption: it is not necessarily the case that voters will always rely on a cognitive set with the highest utility. Instead, idiosyncratic differences and preferences may play an important role in this process. All else being equal, however, voters should prefer to use cognitive strategy sets that maximize the benefits of information while minimizing information costs.
There are several advantages to using this type of modeling strategy to examine how voter’s select the specific cognitive strategies they will use to acquire and process information about the candidates on their ballot. First, this framework effectively demonstrates how changes in the costs and benefits provided by a strategy can affect its likelihood of being used by a voter. When the circumstances of a decision task result in a cognitive tool having a high cost but only resulting in a small benefit, that strategy is less likely to be used to in that task. Second, this modeling strategy clearly establishes how 26 the same voter could use different strategies when faced with different decision tasks, as the probability of using a specific tool varies primarily by the cost and benefits it provides.
Third, this framework does not require strong assumptions that mandate that voters must engage in significant (and highly unlikely) cognitive evaluation of the strategies at their disposal. Finally, this model provides a systematic framework that allows scholars to examine how other characteristics, such as the features of a decision making environment, can mediate the cognitive strategies a voter chooses to use.
V. The Mediating Effect of Electoral Level If, as much of the previous literature would suggest, individuals strategically respond to changes in the environment of their decision making process, frames and factors that determine the characteristics of the cognitive decision environment can dramatically affect individual processing behavior, and ultimately, decision making. From this perspective, even independent of a change in voter preferences or propensity to engage in higher level cognitive processing, environmental changes can alter the frame of each individual’s decision task, and thus have a tangible effect on ultimate decision outputs. As a result, I argue that the significant and readily observable differences in electoral characteristics that vary across levels and offices of the federal system may have a substantive impact on the process through which voters acquire information and make decisions about candidates, issues, and other forms of political involvement. This mediating effect is shown in Figure 2.2. 27
Figure 2. 2: Mediated Model of Environmental Effects on Information Processing
Key to this process is the ability of the electoral environment (E) to mediate the cost and benefits of a particular cognitive strategy set. As a result of altering the individual cost and benefits of using particular strategies, the electoral environment can dramatically alter the utility gained by any cognitive set:
푈푖(푆푛, 퐸) = ((퐸1푖 ∗ 퐵푠푖 ) − (퐸2푖 ∗ 퐶푠푖)) (7)
Importantly, the inclusion of this additional parameter shows how the features of an electoral environment can affect both the costs and the benefits of using a potential cognitive strategy. For example, when voters are asked to make a decision in a highly- publicized presidential or gubernatorial contest, the significant amount of media attention, opinion polls, and publicly available details about the race and the candidates can dramatically decrease the cost of formal information acquisition; however, those same characteristics also substantially increases the likelihood that the voter already knows some important details about the contest, thus reducing the benefits gained by acquiring more information. Importantly, local elections are unlikely to have a similar trend: Low levels of media attention, unknown candidates, and nonexistent polling data can each 28 significantly raise the costs of acquiring information, but also make searching for important details about a potential office-holder more beneficial.
For most scholars of electoral decision making, it is generally assumed that, regardless of circumstance or electoral characteristics, voters will rely on the same decision making strategies when evaluating candidates. As a result, little work has systematically examined how different institutional electoral environments affect the types of cognitive strategies when selecting their candidate of choice. In spite of this limitation, however, there are several theoretically-motivated reasons to expect that the features and characteristics of electoral environments can have a significant effect on the strategies voters utilize when selecting candidates.
Outside of decision making or cognitive processing, a significant amount of previous research has shown that differences between federal institutional levels can have a significant effect on voter behavior, particularly as it related to policy representation and attribution of responsibility. Many scholars, including Stein (1990),
Atkeson and Partin (1995; 1998), Niemi, Stanley, and Vogel (1995), Arceneaux (2006), and Holbolt and Tilley (2014) have found that government operations at different federal or institutional levels of authority and responsibility add an interesting level of nuance in the representative-constituent relationship. As a result, federal systems place higher burdens on voters to make accurate retrospective and attributive judgements across electoral levels.
In addition, as the implications of Downs (1999) and Arceneaux (2006b) suggest, differences across electoral offices and levels may have a substantive impact on a voter’s information search behavior. As Arceneaux notes, “the spate of overlapping policy 29 jurisdictions that characterizes modern federalism may overwhelm citizens, making it too costly for them to acquire the information needed to navigate the maze it creates” (732).
Thus, when comparing candidates across electoral levels, voters may result in increased heuristic use to compensate for the relatively higher costs of information acquisition.
Moreover, the implications of research on voter policy attribution and retrospective evaluations would have significant impacts on voter information decision making at different federal levels. Key to this process are the systematic differences that exist between elections at different levels of government: Campaign differences between elections for offices at different levels of government can be both significant and systematic. National political campaigns are traditionally characterized by high levels of media attention. In presidential races, this coverage starts with speculation about potential candidates and continues unabated until the general election; in between, two years of punditry, primaries, debates, conventions, and ads create a wealth of information for voters to consume. Congressional races, gubernatorial contests, and competitive statewide contests receive similar, if abridged, informational treatments. Local elections, however, are not characterized by such levels of media attention. While the candidates or races may receive some coverage from local news media, the coverage is not traditionally close to the constant and systematic levels reached by national campaigns.
Outside of the formal information environment, other sources of campaign exposure also systematically differ. The difference in turnout rates for federal elections and local elections points to systematic difference in the number of citizens socially engaged in the political environment. As a result of much higher levels of voter engagement for races at the top of the ballot, peer-to-peer information sharing is 30 significantly skewed in favor of large contests for offices in the federal government.
Moreover, to the extent that a voter engages in political discussion within their peer network, elections at higher levels of government are likely to receive a much greater proportion of attention than local races.
As a result, there are systematic differences in both the magnitude of information available and the cost voters experience for information acquisition at different electoral levels, as well as the general complexity of the electoral environment. In national elections or large state contests, while the cost of acquiring information is low, the level of electoral complexity is high. As a result of the large quantities of media and social attention and the large amount of readily available information, voters must invest resources to cognitively ‘sort through’ and simplify the environment to a level of understanding necessary to make an accurate decision. In local elections, however, this magnitude of available information is unlikely to manifest. While information costs are higher, voters in local elections do not experience a similar need to simplify the decision making environment. Low levels of media attention present in local elections do not result in the
‘cognitive overload’ often found in large scale campaigns. As a result of the lack of electoral complexity, voters in local elections may be more willing to bear the costs of information attainment.
In addition to systematic variance in the cost of information attainment, additional information provides significantly different advantages between electoral levels. For example, on the cognitively complex world of federal-level campaigns, there is little incentive for additional information acquisition: even for sophisticates or those with high need for cognition, bearing the costs of information acquisition provides limited benefit, 31 as it serves only as a single piece of data in an preexisting complex decision environment.
For those without such cognitive abilities, information acquisition makes even less sense; for these individuals, the only thing additional information can do is exacerbate an already overcomplicated decision task. As a result, there is little incentive for voters in national campaigns to engage in systematic information acquisition, and significant benefit to be gained through relying on heuristics to reduce the complexity of the decision environment.
Voters in local elections, however, receive significantly different benefits from systematic information processing. For high cognitive processors, the lack of complexity present in local elections results in a greatly simplified decision structure; however, such a structure lacks the ability to systemically differentiate candidates’ positions and stances on important policy issues. As a result, such high-processors must engage in additional information acquisition as the primary means of gaining the information necessary to process important differences between candidates. Similarly, individuals without a high need for cognition have more incentive to engage in information acquisition in local elections as a result of the lack of electoral complexity. For such individuals, while acquisition is not a necessary condition for cognitive decision making, acquiring and processing additional information can be done without encountering the negative effects of high levels of electoral complexity which overcomplicates the decision environment.
It is therefore clear that there are several theoretical reasons to expect institutional level of government to mediate the process through which individual choose information acquisition and heuristic use strategies. In the remainder of this dissertation, I use aggregate and experimental analysis to quantify how changes in the electoral environments found at different levels of government can mediate the amount of 32 information available to voters, as well as the cognitive strategies voter’s use when making decisions about candidates across their ballot. 33
Chapter 3: No Results Found: Examining Information Asymmetries Across Electoral Contexts
Chapter Summary: Nationwide, voters are asked to select thousands of candidates to fill important positions in local government. Each year, voters elect officeholders to fill seats on municipal city councils, county commissions, school boards, and mayoral offices. However, the information environment encountered by voters when trying to make decisions about these down-ballot races can differ significantly from the environment voters experience when choosing candidates for more visible offices. What barriers do voters encounter when trying to become informed about candidates running in their local races? How much information is actually available to voters when choosing candidates for important local positions? When choosing candidate at the bottom of their ballot, do voters face significantly higher asymmetries in available information than when choosing candidates for more well-known races? Using the 2020 election as a snapshot, I compare the amount of information available to voters when choosing candidates at different levels of government. Using both aggregate and experimental data, I find substantial information asymmetries that place additional costs on voters attempting to learn about the local candidates on their ballot.
34
I. Introduction Each year, voters nationwide are asked to select thousands of candidates to fill important positions in local government. As a result, each election cycle a voter’s decision on who to support does not end after they have selected candidates for the well-known and highly visible races at the top of the ballot. Instead, voters must then confront dozens of contests on their ballot for little known offices and even less well-known candidates. A vast range of local or municipal positions, such as mayors, city councilors, county commissioners, administrators, board of education members, sheriffs, registrars, clerks, attorneys, judges, constables, and assessors play a vital role in facilitating and administering effective government; each election, voters must make meaningful decisions about which candidates are best to fill these positions.
Both longstanding normative democratic traditions and a long line of scholarly research contend that voters need information to make meaningful decisions about the candidates on their ballot; from these traditions, it is clear that well informed voters make the best decisions about which candidates to support. However, it is also clear that the costs of acquiring information are not uniform for all types of electoral office. Voters seeking information about the local candidates running in so-called ‘low information elections’ can face significant hurdles in acquiring the necessary information to make a meaningful choice. However, little empirical research has attempted to quantify just how low information these elections actually are.
How much information is actually available to voters when choosing candidates for important local positions? If, in the age of modern technology, social media, and powerful search engines, a voter wanted to obtain important information about the experience and policy positions of their candidates for local office, would they succeed? When choosing 35 candidates at the bottom of their ballot, to what extent do voters face significantly higher asymmetries in available information than when choosing candidates for more well-known races? If, as previous scholars suggest, information plays an important role in the cognitive process voters use when identifying their preferred candidates, differences in the magnitude of available information can have a dramatic effect on who is chosen to serve in the vast majority of elected officials. Using the November 2020 presidential election as a snapshot, I descriptively analyze the barriers voters face when trying to learn important information about candidates running for positions in local government.
This research presents a small but important shift in scholarly perspective by transitioning from a candidate-centered model of campaign behavior to a voter centric resource model of information. Instead of examining how candidates use campaigns to inform voters, I seek to examine how voters themselves use the resources available to acquire important information about the candidates on their ballot.
To directly examine the resources available to voters when acquiring information about candidates for political office, I collect the top ten Google results for searchers seeking information about more than 2000 real candidates across multiple levels and types of offices that appeared on the November 2020 ballot. To further understand how the differences in the type and content of information available online affect real voters seeking to learn about real candidates, I conduct an original experiment asking voters to conduct their own Google search to learn about a candidate. Analysis of more than
20,000 web links, as well as the real experience of voters seeking information about candidates across different electoral levels reveals a clear electoral effect on the availability of information: Voters face significant barriers and information asymmetries 36 when searching online for information about local candidates that is not experienced when gathering details about candidates for higher levels of electoral office. Both aggregate and experimental results indicate that finding information about candidates for local office is much more difficult, with less information available overall, as well as less information about important items, such as the candidate’s experience, views on policy issues, and partisan activity.
II. The Effect of Electoral Level on Information Availability There is little doubt that the amount of information voters are able to acquire about the candidates on their ballot can have far reaching effects. For scholars, in order to participate in the political process individuals must possess specific political information applicable to their potential engagement. The act of voting, even without specific consideration of candidate or issues, requires knowledge on voting requirements, the registration process, as well as voting times and locations. Informed voting however, which most would contend as inherently more advantageous to democratic wellbeing and legitimacy, requires significantly more; citizens much have knowledge on not only the pragmatic requirements of the electoral process, but also of candidates, parties, and policies. Without such knowledge, there is little likelihood that citizens could fully participate in the political process. As Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996) argue in one of the foundational texts on political knowledge, “for citizens to engage in politics in a way that is personally and collectively constructive…they must have the resources to do so {and} a central resource for democratic participation is political information” (5).
In addition to the normative idea that an informed citizenry is a generally good thing for a healthy democracy, many different theoretical models require voters to have detailed 37 information about the candidates on their ballot. Having sufficient information to differentiate candidates and identify potential benefits from their election is a key element of rational explanations of vote choice (Downs, 1957). Similarly, theories of policy representation and attribution of responsibility have, at their core, recognition that individuals require some information as a necessary prerequisite to meaningfully engage in the political process (Duch & Stevenson, 2013; Erikson, Wright, & McIver, 1993).
While information certainty plays an important role in the voting process, requirements for large amounts of details about the candidates on the ballot quickly run into trouble for voters in local or municipal elections: Local elections are notorious for the lack of information available about the candidates running for office. The idea that local elections are low-information affairs is not a new observation. In 1971, Fleitas observed that local elections are “characterized by a dearth of information as to the candidates and their positions on issues” which can result in a “…total lack of relevant information with which the voters can evaluate the candidates” (434). Many others have expressed similar observations (Bauer, 2020; Davis & Southwell, 2015; Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996;
Holbrook & Weinschenk, 2014).
Why then does the amount of information voters can acquire about candidates differ so dramatically between local, state, and federal elections? While the purpose of this particular project is not to identify a specific causal mechanism driving the information asymmetry across electoral levels, there are several theoretically-motivated reasons to expect such a difference to manifest. In particular, the different institutional designs and political environments found across electoral levels can result in two potential 38 mechanisms: (1) institutional resources and professionalization, and (2) differences in campaigns and the electoral environment.
First, there are substantial differences in the institutional resources provided to offices at different electoral levels. By any standard, the U.S. Congress is one of the most professionalized legislatures in the world. Members of Congress are elected to a full-time, highly specialized position. As of 2018, House members without leadership positions earn
$174,000 per year, plus a representational allowance to cover travel, staff, district office space, and supplies, which averages over $1.3 million per member (Brudnick, 2018). In addition to Washington and district office staff, members also have accessed to specialized committee staff, as well as a generous pension plan.
Officials elected to positions in local government rarely come close to this level of professionalization. Most city councilors serve part-time, and receive only modest compensation for their services. According to data from the National League of Cities, the average number of hours most councilors work per week in small and medium cities is
20 and 25, respectively. As a result, “only 2 percent of council members from small cities
(population: 25,000-69,999) and 7 percent of those from medium sized cities (70,000-
199,999) receive $20,000 or more in salary” (Svara, 2003). Overall, only 2% of cities pay councilors $50,000 or more per year.
While there are certainly some local elected officials that serve full time and receive a professional salary, such as judges, clerks, and sheriffs, these positions generally do not rise to the significant level of institutional support found at the state and federal levels.
These significant differences in professionalization would likely have a substantial effect on the amount of information voters are able to find about these non-federal 39 officeholders. A long-line of research examining the variance in the professionalization of state legislatures indicates that lawmakers in professional legislatures tend to have greater levels of contact with their constituents, “are more attentive to their concerns and are more representative of their views than are their counterparts in less professional legislatures” (Squire, 2017, pg. 362; Harden, 2013; Lax and Phillips, 2009; Lax and
Phillips, 2012; Maestas, 2000; Maestas, 2003; S. M. Miller, 2013; Squire, 1993; Wright,
2007). This trend emerges because seats in professionalized positions in government are often viewed as key elements of a professional career, rather than as a part-time commitment to public service. As a result, incumbents serving in professionalized positions are more incentivized to devote time and resources into activities that would maximize their chances of reelection. To this end, officials selected to these types of positions may be more likely to have a visible record of constituent service; activities such as promoting online news stories covering accomplishments, creating a government- sponsored websites listing the official’s experience or important policy positions, or having social media pages advertising accomplishments or ways to contact the official would all increase the ability of voters to learn important information about a candidate.
Professionalized positions that come with staff support can also substantially increase the capacity of an official to build a public information presence. Having significant resources for office staff can allow an elected official to employ dedicated personnel to facilitate online information and constituent interaction; for example, in 2018,
32 members of the U.S. Senate employed staff specifically to coordinate their online or social media presence (Straus, 2018). Even for officials without the resources to hire staff specifically for building an information presence, having staff in traditional aide or clerical 40 roles can significantly reduce the requirements on an official’s time, allowing them to personally engage in greater levels of interaction with constituents and information sharing.
In addition to professionalization, there are significant differences in the use of institutional features such as term limits that can dramatically effect voter’s ability to find important information about candidates. At the federal level, only the president is limited to a specific number of elected terms. At the local level, however, there is a great degree of institutional variation in term limits for local or municipal positions. Importantly, these type of limits on term length in local government can come from multiple sources, including state government and municipalities themselves. While estimates of the use of term limits vary due to this complication, data from the National League of Cities indicates that approximately 15% of cities impose term limits for mayoral and councilor positions, with larger cities being more likely to impose term limits (National League of Cities, 2016).
There is also substantial variation in the actual term length requirement, both in number of consecutive terms, as well as the length of each term.
It is not difficult to conceptualize how the imposition of term limits could significantly affect the amount of publicly available information a voter is able to acquire about a candidate for public offices. By definition, term limits limit the amount of time an officeholder can spend in office, and thus significantly increase candidate turnover (Cain
& Levin, 1999). Incumbent officeholders with shorter tenures have less opportunity to build a substantial record of public service and accomplishments for voters to consider.
Similarly, new candidates (particularly those at the local level who have never held public office previously) are unlikely to have a significant record of public information for voter’s 41 consideration. Together, these would likely substantially decrease the amount of information available for voters to acquire and consider before voting.
In addition to the institutional advantages of offices at higher electoral levels, there are dramatic differences in the electoral environments between local, state, and federal campaigns that can have a significant effect on voter’s ability to find out information about the candidates on their ballot.
It is well documented that federal and statewide campaigns often function as smooth, professional campaign operations with full time campaign staff, consultants, and large-scale strategic plans to mobilize voters, increase public interest, attract endorsements, and generate PAC support. In contrast, local races rarely reach such levels of campaign activity; school board races, for example, are most often “low salience affairs with candidates spending very little money and with interest groups not being a major factor” (Krebs, 2014, pg. 202; Deckman, 2004).
Observationally, it is quite easy to see major differences in the amount of funds campaigns raise across different levels of government. In 2018, for example, the average cost for winning a seat in the House of Representatives was $2,092,822; even challengers who lost federal House seats by more than 20 points spent an average of
$191,167 (Brookings, 2020). State legislative seats can often reach $150,000 (Alter,
2018), with statewide campaigns requiring much, much more; between 2013-2016, for example, average gubernatorial races cost more than $9.8 million (Stepleton, 2018).
Even competitive local-level races in major cities rarely reach the amount of campaign funds found in federal or statewide races. Winners of city council races in large cities spend on average $115,000 (Malinowski, 2013); winners in the 2019 Houston city 42 council races, for example, only spent an average of $181,000 (Rice & Land, 2020), well below the levels obtained in statewide or federal contests.
However, even these large metropolitan city council races do not adequately represent how little money is often spent campaigning in local races, particularly for seats on small specialized boards or districts. Many local elections do not feature any campaign spending or political advertisements (Ballotpedia, 2016). For example, nationwide an estimated 75% of school board candidates raise (and spend) less than $1,000 (NSBA,
2018).
These substantively smaller campaigns, as well the lower levels of campaign resources they raise, can significantly limit the candidate’s ability to inform the public. As
Holbrook and Weinschenk (2014) observe, “at their core, campaigns are information- generating organizations, and this function helps reduce the information costs associated with voting” (44). Smaller campaigns, or those without substantial resources, would likely be less equipped to engage in large-scale information dissemination. While professionally-run campaigns for Congress or a statewide position likely have the resources to hire dedicated staff to handle public outreach and information sharing (such as a web designer and social media coordinator), local all-volunteer campaigns would likely have a much less developed information sharing strategy.
Perhaps Davis and Southwell (2015) best summarize the ultimate effect of these campaign differences on the information voters receive during a campaign:
“During most elections, the greatest amount of money, visibility, and
attention goes to the races at the top of the ballot, causing down ballot races
to be drowned out. Voters are therefore exposed to less discussion about 43
the candidates and the office they seek, leaving them less informed and
less likely to identify a purpose in voting for the position. With each step
down the ballot, budgets tend to get smaller and voter information on the
race decreases” (120).
Taken together, these significant institutional and electoral differences can have a profound effect on the ability of campaigns to engage in information sharing behavior. For voters, this results in significant asymmetries in information available for candidates across their ballot. As a result, I expect:
Hypothesis 1: Voters experience lower barriers for acquiring information
about candidates seeking office in higher levels of the federal system.
III. Candidate Information & Online Searches In order to effectively scrutinize the authentic experience voters encounter when attempting to locate information about the candidates on their ballot, it is important to observe the availability of information where the most voters actually try to acquire it: online. Dramatic expansion in the availability of computers, tablets, smartphones, and internet access have enabled voters to venture online in search of information instead of relying on traditional information sources. As of 2019, almost 90% of U.S. households have an active internet subscription (Pew, 2019a), compared to the record low number of households who receive a daily newspaper3 (Pew, 2019b), and the declining viewership of both national and local TV news (Matsa, 2018). As a result, it is clear that online tools
3 As of 2018, the estimated total circulation of weekday daily newspapers is 28,544,137, which gives a newspaper access rate of 8% of the total US 2018 population. However, this number is quite likely to be inflated due to total circulation estimates including commercial and other non- resident newspaper deliveries.
44 such as Google’s search engine can be a powerful tool for voters seeking information about political candidates.
A wide range of scholars have also examined the important role that the internet plays in political information sharing. For example, online tools like candidate websites can be an important place for citizens to learn about the policy positions of their representatives, as well as access constituent services (Esterling, Lazer, & Neblo, 2013).
For politicians, using online information tools such as websites or social media allows candidates for public office the opportunity to have direct control over the information that is presented, rather than rely on information diffusion from news media (Lazer, Neblo &
Easterling, 2011). Similarly, partisan voters often visit Democratic and Republican
Facebook pages and interact with information content by liking posts and leaving comments (Cerina & Dutch, 2020). Several scholars have also found high correlations between voter political behavior both online and offline, including ideology and political sentiment, as well as ultimate vote choice (Barbera, 2015; Haenschen, 2020; Kristensen et al, 2017).
In particular, there are several reasons to use Google search results to measure the availability of information to voters seeking to determine their preferred candidate.
First, there is little doubt that the internet is the key tool individuals use to acquire information to aid them in making decisions. Recent Pew polls indicate that when making important decisions, 46% of Americans rely on the internet or Google as a resource
(Turner & Rainie, 2020). This is dramatically higher than those who rely on the advice of family or friends (14%), the news (2%) or any form of print media (8%). High saliency issues can drive the number of those relying on the internet for information even higher; 45 in 2020, for example, an estimated 70% of Americans searched online for information about the coronavirus (Anderson & Vogels, 2020).
As a result, voters attempting to access a candidate's website would likely use a search engine as an important online starting point. Search engines offer high levels of familiarity and convenience by allowing users to find many different information items in one location. Google searches for political candidates can return a wide variety of items, including candidate or officeholder websites, Twitter or Facebook pages, news stories,
Wikipedia biographies, and endorsements information. This enables voters to quickly peruse a wide range of different types of information quickly, while still enabling voters to access more detailed material by clicking on a provided link.
It is also clear that Google is the primary search engine used by individuals seeking information. While the actual number of Google searches is proprietarily and not publicly available, estimates indicate that Google is continually processing a vast number of searches. It is estimated that Google handles more than 2 trillion searches per year, with approximately 70k searches each second, and an average of four searches per person per day (Prater, 2019). In total, Google engines and affiliated properties handle an estimated 90% of all searches (Fishkin, 2018). Yahoo and Bing, the next two largest search engine properties, handle only an estimated 2.4% and 2.2% of searches, respectively.
As a result, I use a two-stage research design to test the effect of electoral level on the amount of information voters can acquire when searching online for details about the candidates on their ballot: in stage 1, I collect Google search results from live searchers of more than 2000 real candidates running for elected office. In stage 2, I use 46 an original experiment to measure the difficulties voters have when attempting to acquire information about candidates from different electoral levels.
IV. Examining Candidate Online Information: Aggregate Data Collection & Results To examine the amount of aggregate information available about political candidates online, I first create an inventory of more than 2000 candidates running for office on the November 2020 ballot. As part of the data collection, details about the amount and type of information available through traditional Google searches were collected for more than 1100 candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, and more than 900 candidates seeking election to local office nationwide. The specific process used to identify candidates, as well as the characteristics of these candidates, is discussed below:
First, I use Ballotpedia to identify all candidates running for the House of
Representatives on the 2020 presidential election ballot, regardless of party or electoral competitiveness. In total, 1113 candidates running for election to the House are included in the data. The vast majority of these candidates are either Democrats (~39%) or
Republicans (~38%). Approximately 10% of House candidates are Libertarians; independents (~6%) and a smattering of third parties make up the remainder of the candidates. 382 candidates in the data are sitting incumbent House members, and 13 candidates are running completely unopposed.
To create a list of real candidates running in local elections, I draw candidates from a sample of cities and counties Ballotpedia lists as hosting a local election on the
November 2020 presidential election ballot. In total, 965 contested candidates running for office in either a municipal or county election are included in the data. These candidates 47 represent 386 separate local electoral contests, drawn from more than 40 cities and 18 counties across 20 states.4
Unlike the congressional data, which can include candidates running unopposed, local election candidates are only included in the sample if the race is actually contested.
Note that this does not necessarily mean that the race is competitive; it only requires that voters have an actual choice printed on their ballot. This difference between including unopposed candidates is done strategically to provide the most conservative estimate possible of the differences in the amount of information available online about candidates running at different electoral levels. If a substantial number of local officials are running unopposed, and thereby have no need to campaign or construct an online presence, the
4 Unfortunately, it is impossible to quantify exactly how representative this sample of local election candidates actually is to the underlying population of local election candidates in all municipalities across the nation, or in fact to even identify what percentage of local races being held in November 2020 this sample actually represents. Do to the devolved nature of U.S. electoral administration, there is not a centralized nation-wide depository of the cities, the names of candidates for office, and they offices they are seeking. As a result, I rely on Ballotpedia as the most comprehensive list of local candidates across a large number of jurisdictions. The sample of local candidates includes all of the candidates running in competitive races in cities or municipalities listed by Ballotpedia as having a local election on November 3, 2020, as well as a substantial number of counties. However, observationally it is clear that the cities listed by Ballotpedia tend to be relatively large urban areas with populations greater than 100k. For example, jurisdictions in the sample include Phoenix, Long Beach, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, Louisville, New Orleans, Baltimore, Austin, Denver, and Richmond, as well as Fresno County California, Ramsey County Minnesota, Miami-Dade County Florida, Orange County California, and Harris County Texas. These relatively-large urban areas are dramatically larger than the average municipality; current 2020 census data indicates that approximately 76% of U.S. incorporated cities have fewer than 5000 residents (Toukabri & Medina, 2020). However, while these cities are not representative of all U.S. municipalities, I am confident that any bias produced by the sample will provide a conservative estimate of the difference between information on local and congressional candidates. Candidates in larger cities have several advantages not present in races in small municipalities, including larger and more lucrative media markets, active journalistic operations, and larger campaign operations and budgets that would each increase the amount of information voters are able to acquire. As a result, I am confident that the differences that emerge between the congressional and local candidates in the sample are conservative estimates of a real underlying difference in the amount of information available to voters.
48 estimate of the actual difference between actively campaigning candidates may be overinflated.5
The distribution of the type of offices being sought by the local candidates in the sample is shown in Table 3.1. City council candidates comprise the largest classification of local candidates in the data, with over 40%. Approximately 22% of local candidates are running either in a contested judicial race or in a judicial retention election.6
Candidates seeking positions on a large variety of special districts, such as community college districts, water boards, transportation commissions, development districts, and other boards and commissions, comprise almost 21% of the sample. 275 candidates
(~28.5%) of the local candidates are running in partisan elections, with the remaining 680 candidates seeking nonpartisan positions. 291 candidates (~30.2%) are incumbents.
5 This is particularly important given the probability of a significantly larger proportion of local candidates running unopposed than House candidates. In 2018, only 43 U.S. House seats (about 10%) were not contested by both major parties (Berkowitz & Esteban, 2018) while an estimated 25% of 2019 local elections were uncontested (Ballotpedia, 2019). These differences are likely caused by a variety of factors, including difference in the professionalization and salary provided by the offices, the political ambition of candidates, the prestige and clout associated with holding the position, and perhaps most importantly, the existence of centralized candidate recruitment mechanisms for higher level offices. 6 Judicial retention elections are a unique institutional feature of many states that allow judges to assume office (traditionally through appointment), serve a short term, and then go before the electorate to see if they are allowed to retain in office. By construction, these races force candidates to be incumbent officeholders, and also ensure that voters always have a meaningful choice on their ballot: to return the judge to office, or to reject the appointment. They are included in this sample for one key reason: they are highly externally valid. For voters in states that use retention elections, these types of elections are a very common ballot feature. As a result, it is important to identify how much information is actually available to voters when considering these unique types of races.
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Table 3. 1: Number of Local Candidates Included in Sample by Office
To gather details about the type of information readily available to voters when searching about a candidate online, each candidate’s highest ranking Google search results are collected. For each candidate, information about the top 10 native search results (i.e. the results on the first page of a Google search) is collected. To run the search, information about the candidate is entered into the standard Google search engine; searches for Congressional candidates used the syntax “John Smith for
Congress”, while local races used the candidates name, city or county, and office (i.e.
“John Smith for Phoenix City Council”). Specific details that are collected for each result include the URL, web domain, title snippet, page description, and its placement on the first page of the candidate’s results. In total, details on 20,780 individual links are included in the data (the top 10 links for each of 2078 candidates).
To more easily identify the online information differences between officials seeking office at different electoral levels, I subdivide analysis of the results of each candidate’s 50
Google results into two categories: domain results and content results. Analysis of the web domain of collected links examines the type of websites most likely to emerge from a Google search about a particular candidate, while analysis on the context searches each scraped web description for specific words or phrases. These categories effectively measure the amount and type of information available to voters in unique ways. Domain results indicate which sites candidates and campaigns are actually using to information their electorates, which can provide important descriptive insights to the information- sharing behaviors of candidates across electoral levels. Content items, however, equate to much more well-established information items. Using content terms like ‘issues’,
‘experience’, or ‘education’ can send important signals to voters about the candidate’s policy positions, ideals, or qualifications; terms like ‘Republican’ or ‘Democrat’ and
‘conservative’, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ can similarly be used to send meaningful partisan signals.
Domain and Content Results
I begin by analyzing the most common websites that appear when searching for information about political candidates. To do this, I identify the probability of at least one of the top ten links for each candidate coming from a series of commonly used web domains, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Wikipedia. I also use the candidate’s name to identify if the candidate has a personal or campaign webpage, as well as identify the number of sites that are government sponsored and have a .gov address.7 Each web
7 Unlike other sites that have consistent and easily measured web domains, personal and campaign sites often have unique names and web domains. In order to create the most accurate count possible of the number of candidates with these types of sites, personal and campaign websites were coding using both the candidates first and last names independently. Thus, for a candidate named John Brown, johnforcongress.com, brownforcouncil.com, vote4john.com, and johnbrown.com, would all be considered campaign websites. 51 domain is then aggregated and dichotomized at the candidate level. Thus, a candidate is recorded as a 1 if any of their top ten links come from a specific web domain and a 0 if not.
As shown in Table 3.2 and Figure 3.1, there are many significant differences in the types of websites used by candidates running for office at different electoral levels: When compared to candidates running for local office, candidates for congressional seats are approximately 39% more likely to have a personal campaign website, 170% more likely to have a Twitter account, 20% more likely to have a use Facebook to campaign, 57% more likely to have a government sponsored (ie .gov) website, and are a staggering 538% more likely to have a Wikipedia page.
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Table 3. 2: Difference Between Domain and Content Items for Local and Congressional Candidates
It is not difficult to conceptualize how these differences in the types of sites that appear during Google searches can have a meaningful impact on the information voters are able to acquire when evaluating candidates. For example, having a Wikipedia page can present voters with a concise yet detailed record of the candidate, including important elements like biographies and background information, qualifications, previous accomplishments, policy and issue positions, and previous election results. Similarly, 53 government sponsored sites, such as incumbent web pages, can provide important information that has an additional perceived level of credibility, as it comes from a government sponsored source (Esterling, Wright, & McIver, 1993). Personal or campaign webpages also provide candidates invaluable opportunities to present themselves and their qualifications before the electorate in whatever way they choose, free from external inference; these sites can often include important information about partisanship, ideology, and policy stances, as well as solicitations for donations and volunteers to aid the campaign. Finally, in addition to being potential sources of important information, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter can provide voters with a direct connection to campaigns in order to ask questions and directly interact with candidates.
Figure 3. 1: Difference in the Likelihood of Using Web Domain by Candidate Level
Together, the substantial disparity in these sites appearing far more often in search results for candidates at higher electoral levels results in a significant information cost imbalance; while voters often see familiar websites with detailed information about 54 candidates when searching for who to resent their interests in Washington, the same cannot be said about those running to serve their interests in City Hall.
This disparity in available information is further widened when one examines the actual content of the websites themselves. To gain traction on the actual content of the link (without having to fully scrape almost 21,000 webpages) I preform a content analysis of the approximately 20 word description Google provides for each site. Specifically, I explore whether a series of specific words or phrases are included in the website description. This has the advantages of both effectively summarizing the content of the page, as well as previewing what the voter themselves would experience during live information search. Like the domain results, each search term is aggregated and dichotomized at the candidate level. Thus, a candidate is recorded as a 1 if any of their top ten include a specific word or phrases and a 0 if not.
As expected, information about congressional candidates is generally much easier to find than details about local candidates. As shown in Figure 3.2, descriptions for congressional candidate sites are significantly more likely to include terms affiliated with important policy information than sites for local candidates; words such as issues (133% more likely), tax (65% more likely), and health (62% more likely) appear more often in sites for congressional candidates. Moreover, congressional sites more often have descriptions containing terms indicating cues for information about a candidate’s background and qualifications, such as the words about (50% more likely) and experience
(32% more likely). Finally, congressional candidates are much more likely to use cues for partisanship and ideology; these candidates are 110% more likely to include the terms
Republican or Democrat in their sites, and are 221% more likely to use the terms 55 conservative, liberal, or progressive. Descriptions for local candidates do, however, have a few advantages; these sites are more likely to include cues about education and school, as well as about crime and safety.
Figure 3. 2: Difference in the Likelihood of Using a Content Term by Level of Candidate
Legislative Candidate Robustness Check
As a check on the robustness of these findings, I also preform the domain and content analysis using just the subsample of local candidates running in city council races.
While using the full sample of many different race types is far more representative of what voters would experience when trying to learn about all of the candidates on their ballot, it could be the case that the wide range of institutional and political responsibilities present in down-ballot races may cause campaigns to rely on fundamentally different communication strategies to present themselves to voters; this would likely manifest as voters finding different types of information online. Thus, by comparing only candidates running for city council to those seeking seats in the House of Representatives, I can 56 minimize the variance in the institutional arrangements of the office (as both candidates are seeking a single seat in a multimember legislative body).
These results are presented in Table 3.3. Overall, relying on just the city council subset produces the same results as the entire local election sample, with a few small differences: the probability of a candidate using a Facebook domain becomes statistically indistinguishable for candidates at different electoral levels, and city council candidates are significantly more likely to use YouTube than candidates running for congressional seats. On the content analysis, health loses its statistical significance, but the substantive difference for experience increases significantly (from a percent difference of 31% to a difference of 146%).
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Table 3. 3: Difference Between Domain and Content Items for City Council and Congressional Candidates
V. Measuring Voter Online Search Behavior: Experimental Design & Results From these results, it is clear that there is a significant asymmetry in the amount of information available online about candidates running for different electoral offices.
However, the fact that such differences exist does not necessitate that voters perceive a difference in the difficulty of information searches for different candidates. To gain a more thorough understanding of the effects of information asymmetries on voter search 58 behavior, I conduct an original experiment to measure the difficulties real voters experience when trying to find meaningful information about real political candidates.
As part of this experiment, participants were asked to spend a few minutes searching online about a real candidate running for office in the November 2020 elections.8 To create a corpus of real candidates running for office, twenty-five congressional candidates and twenty-five city council candidates were randomly selected from those included in the aggregate analysis. Respondents were provided the name of one of these candidates, and asked to spend a few minutes researching them online. To facilitate the experiment, 350 participants were recruited through an online survey platform; 10 respondents failed to complete the task, and are not included in further analysis.
Participants are assigned to treatment through a two-stage randomization process:
First, each respondent is randomized to either the congressional group or the city council group. In the second stage, each respondent is randomly assigned to one of the twenty- five candidates in their assigned electoral level. For example, those assigned to the congressional group are then randomized assigned to research one of the twenty-five congressional candidates included in the sample; those in the city council group are assigned to research one of the twenty-five city council candidates.
To provide the most external validity possible, very few instructions are provided to participations about how to conduct their online search. The only guidance provided to
8 To ensure maximum potential exposure to online material, the experiment was conducted immediately prior to the November 2020 elections. For this particular task, this timing is important to ensure that all information has had sufficient time to be posted (such as a candidate publishing their website or a news organization posting candidate responses to a questionnaire) but not after the election to ensure that material is still available (such as a candidate removing or releasing their website after the election). 59 participants was the statement to “Copy and paste the following name and office into
Google, and spend two to three minutes researching the candidate.” Thus, participants were free to search for, and collect, information as they normally would when searching online, free from undue influence from the experiment. Some participants may have accessed many different links, while others may have preferred to have a more comprehensive evaluation of a smaller number of sites.
After completing their information search, participants were asked to answer a series of questions indicating their experience during the search. Participants responded to three Likert-scale items measuring the difficulty of their online search; specific items asked (1) how difficult was it to find information about the candidate, (2) how much information did you find about the candidate and (3) compared to a normal online search you might use to find information about a product or service, was this search better or worse. Participants were also asked to indicate if they observed any information about the candidates on several different topics, including issue positions, political party affiliation, background, experience, and endorsements.
In total, 159 participants searched for information about a city council candidate, and 181 participants were randomized to investigate a congressional candidate. Across both treatment groups, participants are generally well educated, young, and liberal; 68.5% of the sample has at least a bachelor’s degree, and 58.5% of the sample report being between 25 and 44 years old. Democrats in the sample (48.2%) also significantly outnumber both independents (25.8%) and republicans (25.8%). 53.2% of the sample identified as a male, and 46.7% identified as female. Importantly, independence test indicate that there is no significant differences between the treatment groups in regards 60 to sex, education, age, party affiliation, or interest in politics. More information about the sample, including a full balance table, can be found in the Chapter 3 appendix.
Experimental Results & Discussion
First, I examine the effect of electoral level on the difficulty of respondent’s information searches. As shown in Figure 3.3, difference-in-means test indicate that respondents randomized to search for details about city council candidates reported significantly more difficulty in finding information than respondents in the congressional treatment. On a 5-point Likert scale ranging from very easy to very difficult, respondents searching for information about a congressional candidate had an average difficulty score of 1.757, while those assigned to the city council treatment had a mean difficulty score of
2.088. This difference is highly significant (p<0.001), and indicates that transitioning from searching for details about a congressional candidate to a city council candidate increases the difficulty of the information search by over 18%.
Figure 3. 3: Effect of Electoral Level on the Perceived Difficulty of Information Search
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Second, I explore the effect of electoral level on the amount of information voters were able to find on their assigned candidate. For this measure, respondents were asked to indicate how much information they found about the candidate on a five-point scale ranging from no or very little information to a great deal of information. As expected, there is both a significant and substantively meaningful difference in the amount of information participants were able to find about candidates seeking different types of elected office.
As shown in Figure 3.4, respondents in the city council treatment had an average information acquisition score of 3.14, while respondents randomized to congressional candidates have an average score of 3.54. Thus, respondents report information acquisition scores approximately 11% lower for city council candidates compared to their congressional counterparts.
Similar, if slightly smaller, effects emerge from examination of the comparative quality of the candidate information search compared to a normal online search the user might perform. While candidates from both treatment groups indicate that searching for information about political candidates is about the same as a normal search for details about a product or service, respondents in the congressional treatment condition reported slightly higher search quality scores. As shown in Figure 3.5, on average, scores from respondents in the congressional treatment were 6% higher, indicating that searches for information about these candidates are of slightly higher quality. While the magnitude of this effect is small, the difference is both significant (p<0.05) and substantively meaningful. 62
Figure 3. 4: Effect of Electoral Level on the Amount of Information Found
Figure 3. 5: Effect of Electoral Level on Comparative Search Quality
As a robustness check on these findings, I perform a series of regressions to identify the effect of electoral level on information searches while holding a variety of voter-level characteristics constant; these results are reported in Table 3.4. Overall, the results found by the difference-in-means test hold for each of the search experience 63 measures across a wide range of model specifications and control variables; in addition, the inclusion of voter-level characteristics strengthens the quantified effect of electoral level for each of the three measures. These substantive effects hold even with the inclusion of individual factors that may affect both proficiency, familiarity, and experience with online searchers, such as age and education, as well as political characteristics such as party identification and political interest.
Table 3. 4: Linear Robustness Checks of the Effect of Electoral Level on Search Difficulty, Amount of Information, and Search Quality
Together, these results present a clear picture: Voters report that finding information about city council candidates is more difficult, with fewer results and a lower search quality, than finding information for candidates running for office in higher electoral 64 levels. To gain additional understanding of the effects of different types of information, I examine the comparative difficulty respondents experienced finding specific details about the candidate. Respondents were asked to indicate if they were able to find information about the candidate on eight different characteristics, including the candidate’s most important issue, views on jobs, views of education, political party, background, experience, endorsements, and any negative information.
As shown in Figure 3.6, respondents find it significantly more difficult to acquire information for city council candidates in four information areas. Not surprisingly given the significant proportion of city council races that are non-partisan, respondents were much more likely to find out information about a congressional candidates partisan affiliation than for a city council candidate. Much more normatively concerning, however, city council voters were significantly less likely to find information about the candidate’s positions on key issues such as jobs and education, as well as the candidate’s experience for office. These findings reinforce the important differences between information acquisition costs identified in the aggregate analysis. 65
Figure 3. 6: Effect of Electoral Level on the Probability of Finding Information
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VI. Concluding Remarks Information can play an important role for voters when deciding which of the candidates on their ballot to support. However, significant institutional and electoral factors can dramatically affect the amount of information voters are able to acquire on candidates for local or municipal office. When compared to the information available about congressional candidates, local candidates are much less likely to have their own websites or to utilize commonly used social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook; these candidates are also much less likely to have the advantages of a government website or a Wikipedia page. To complicate the task of voter’s searching for information even further, the details about local candidates that are present are significant less likely to include terms associated with issue positions, clues about the candidates background and experience, and references to partisanship and ideology. As a result, experimental participants report that attempting to search for information about local candidates is significantly more difficult than for their counterparts at other levels of government.
From the strength and robustness of these effects, it is clear that this area is deserving of additional scholarly attention. In the short term, scholars should explore in greater detail how voters react and adapt to the unequal costs of information for different candidates running for different offices. In the long term, we should identify how to best promote equality in electoral information costs, and identify if fixing the disparity in information can aide many of the readily observable problems facing local elections, such as low turnout. 67
Chapter 4: Examining Descriptive Differences in Decision Making Across Electoral Contexts
Chapter Summary: Voters confront a long and varied ballot on Election Day. In addition to a small number of highly visible contests for federal offices at the top of the ballot, voters are asked to select candidates for a much larger number of far less visible state and local offices. What factors affect the process through which voters seek information when making decisions among candidates for different offices at different levels of government? When do voters choose to acquire and process detailed information, and when do they instead rely on heuristics? I use an original survey experiment to measure voter demand for, and the influence of, different types of information on voters’ candidate choices across electoral contests and levels of government. Findings show significant support for an electoral level effect: voters show systematic differences in the type of sources they select as the most important across electoral levels. All else being equal, voters in local elections are more likely to use detailed information, while voters in national campaigns are more likely to use heuristics than their local-election counterparts.
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I. Introduction Imagine a world in which a voter unknowingly faced two candidates simultaneously challenging one another for two different positions on the same ballot. The candidates, concurrently dueling for positions on a local school board and a seat in the state legislature, each run identical campaigns for both positions, concentrating on the same issues and using the same campaign strategies to win both seats. As a result, the voter is faced with sets of candidates running near-identical campaigns for positions at different electoral levels. Such a scenario provokes a novel question: would the same voter use the same type of cognitive strategies to evaluate the same set of candidates running for different offices?
In an ideal world with complete and unobstructed counterfactual inference, analyzing circumstances like the one presented above would be quite simple. The cognitive behavior of the same voter evaluating the same candidates running for different offices but relying on the same issues, positions, and campaigns could be measured. Any difference in the process the voter used to evaluate the candidates could be directly and solely attributed to the level of office being sought by the candidates. In reality, however, quantifying the effect of electoral level is far more challenging: Candidates rarely appear multiple times on the same ballot, campaigns differ dramatically, and would-be officeholders at the bottom of the ballot encounter substantially different electoral and media environments than their top-of-the-ballot peers.
In this chapter, I use experimental methods to replicate this counterfactual ideal.
Holding all else equal, what factors affect the process through which voters seek information when making decisions among candidates for different offices at different levels of government? 69
As a proof of concept to demonstrate both the ability to empirically observe differences in cognitive strategies across electoral levels and the methodological advantages of observing information use through online survey experiments, I conduct two experiments measuring differences between individual information use in electoral contests across levels of government. Importantly, these experiments were designed to serve as critical tests to evaluate voter information behavior across electoral levels, rather than to test specific theoretical mechanisms. As a result, each experiment provides voters the choice to use different types of information to evaluate candidates for public office. In the first experiment, I examine differences between an individual’s decision to engage in systematic information processing and reliance on information heuristics. In the second experiment, I analyze the amount and types of information voters access during campaigns for different electoral offices. Together, these experiments provide substantial evidence that electoral level can have a meaningful mediating effect on citizen information acquisition and cognitive processing.
II. Why Electoral Environments Matter: Information & Motivation In Chapter 2, I used a dynamic cognitive information processing model to identify some of the theoretical reasons to expect the cognitive environment to mediate the tools voters use to make decisions about political candidates. I now turn to exploring the implications of that model in order to build testable predictions.
While few scholars have cast cognitive environments in terms of electoral level, some scholars have examined how the nature of an information environment can affect decision making. In their analysis of the effects of environments on cognitive decision making, Kuklinski et al (2001) argue that “the nature of the environment can affect the 70 quality of {citizen} decisions…” by serving both as a source of information as well as a
“motivational role of inducing citizens to take their tasks seriously, invest effort, and bear the psychic burdens of responsible decision making.” (422). Following this information and motivation framework, there are several reasons to expect voters to use different types of strategies when evaluating candidates from different places on their ballot.
In the context of the availability of information, the aggregate and experimental analysis in Chapter 3 provides clear evidence of the different amounts of detail available about candidates seeking contrasting electoral office. As a result of the differences in the electoral environment, voters seeking information about local candidates face substantially higher information costs than voters attempting to evaluate candidates seeking higher electoral offices. Local candidates have diminished web presences, and generally have less publicly available information, resulting in harder searches and fewer available information items. Likely because of these high information costs, voters are also generally less informed about their local candidates for office. This creates an interesting implication: while local elections can significantly increase the costs of acquiring new information, the dearth of accessible details about candidates can significantly increase the benefits of acquiring new information.
In addition to determining the costs and benefits of acquiring detailed political information, the electoral environment can have a substantial effect on the motivation of individual voters to invest the time and cognitive energy required to peruse detailed information acquisition.
First, it is quite likely that the difference in the efficacy and perceived importance of different electoral levels would result in asymmetric motivation for voters. There is a 71 longstanding scholarly recognition of the effect of interpersonal relationships on motivating costly political activity. In the mobilization literature, for example, few factors increase the willingness of individuals to bear the cost of voting as direct pro-turnout contact with an acquaintance (Beck et al, 2002; Michelson & Nickerson, 2011; Lup, 2016).
From a purely spatial proximity or network perspective, these direct interpersonal relationships are much more likely to be both shared and salient between members of the same municipality than by the members of a shared state or nation. This higher level of interconnectedness can provide an additional efficacious motivation for individuals in local government conditions to engage in more systematic levels of information consumption.
Moreover, this interconnectedness is self-reinforcing: because municipal and other locally produced policies have direct and tangible effects on both the individual directly, as well as the other community members of which the individual is connected, acquiring and considering detailed information is an additional efficacious activity individuals can undertake to improve the status of their community.
The media environment in local elections, however, may provide a cross-cutting influence that would diminish detailed information consideration in local races. In addition to connectedness of races in local elections, the level of media attention itself can provide an additional efficacious motivation to invest cognitive resources in making decisions between local candidates. Following the media’s key ability to set the electoral agenda
(McCombs & Shaw, 1972) voters can infer important details from candidates and races the media chooses to cover, and those they do not. Through this process, voters can use the fact that the media presented information or covered some races but not others to infer important details about the relative importance of down-ballot contests; thus, voters 72 can use the prevalence of media information as a heuristic to infer the importance of a political contest. From a voter’s perspective, contests that receive high levels of media attention must, by the virtue of receiving such levels of coverage, be politically important.
Races that do not receive high levels of coverage or that are ignored completely by the media are similarly viewed as less impactful by voters. Based upon these inferences, voters would be more likely to bear the cost of cognitive consideration of candidates in races deemed to be politically important, and less likely to spend significant time considering candidates in less important races. Thus, the local elections increase the frequency with which voters pursue detailed information as a result of their interconnectedness with their local community, but this effect may be limited by the perceived unimportance of local races.
Second, in addition to affecting the efficacy and perceived importance of the contest, electoral level may motivate individuals to pursue additional information by affecting the saliency of their affective judgements. Systematic differences in the information environment present in local and national government can have a significant and substantive effect on the salience of affective attachments. Key to this process is the role of elites and messaging in affective judgement formation. Many scholars have recognized the role elites play in the attitude formation of members of the mass public
(Feldman, 1988; Sniderman et al, 1991; Zaller, 1992; Hinich & Munger, 1994; Graber,
2004; Federinco & Schneider, 2007; Lupton, Myers, and Thorton, 2015). In this process, elites send affective, emotionally charged messages about candidates and issues that are synthesized and distributed to voters through the media. Elite and media activity, however, is much more likely to cover national political frames than local issues. As a 73 result, individual voters are much more likely to form strong emotional judgements on widely covered national political elites than local political officials. Consequently, individuals are much more likely to have strong affective views on presidential candidates than on candidates for local municipal city council positions.
A key byproduct of the lack on strong affective judgments in local government is an increase in the use of systematic information processing for voter decision making. If, as much of the literature on affective judgements would suggest, strongly held affective judgements can play a significant role in political decision making, it is not difficult to conceptualize how important institutional and environmental differences between levels of government would affect the use of affective attachments. If the saliency of affective judgements in local governmental conditions is lower, the usefulness of those attachments is comparatively weakened and the attachments function as a less accurate cost cutting mechanism; as a result, individuals considering issues or candidates in the context of local government would likely have to engage in higher levels of formal information processing in order to make accurate decisions.
Together, these informational and motivation characteristics provide substantial justification to expect electoral level to mediate the types of cognitive strategies voters use when evaluating candidates. As a result, I expect:
Hypothesis 1: Voter cognitive processing strategies will be different across
federal governmental levels.
In addition, these predictions seem to be in line with a variety of previous research:
In his discussion of voter information search strategies, Redlawsk (2004) observes that the complexity of the decision environment can have a significant effect on the strategies 74 voters use to acquire information. In complex environments, voters often adapt different strategies on information collection and consideration in order to “make sense of the world by simplifying it” (608). In simple environments, however, individuals engage in greater and more evenly distributed information search and consumption behavior. This would reinforce the idea that local voters would be more likely to engage in detailed information searches.
Similarly, Martinelli’s (2006) formal discussion on rational ignorance and the cost related to voter information acquisition also supports the expectation of different information behaviors at different electoral levels. Since acquiring information is, in and of itself, a costly endeavor, rational individuals will only collect information when the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs. However, such benefits are only likely to materialize in elections with a small number of voters. As a result, Martinelli concludes that “as the number of voters increases, voters acquire less and less information” (226).
Each of these findings would support the argument that voter information acquisition behavior would likely be greater in local elections as a result of the decreased complexity of the electoral environment. As a result, I expect that:
Hypothesis 2: During local government elections, voters will engage in higher
levels of systematic information processing than voters in national government
conditions.
In order to evaluate the variation in individual-level information acquisition and heuristic use across electoral levels, I use two survey experiments that allow voters to identify the cognitive strategies they would use to evaluate candidates at different levels of office. 75
III. Experiment 1: Tradeoffs between Information Acquisition and Heuristic Use In order to evaluate variation in individual information acquisition and heuristic use across electoral levels, I use a survey experiment of participants recruited through
Amazon Mechanical Turk.9 In total, 651 respondents are used for data analysis.10 As part of the survey process, respondents are presented with the opportunity to gather information and learn about a potential candidate for office; the federal level of office the candidate was seeking is allowed to vary between treatments.
After answering survey batteries collecting demographic information, political attitudes, and political knowledge, each respondent is randomly shown a visual facsimile of a candidate’s website that contains a series of ‘links’ to information about the candidate and his positions. Both the candidate and the website, as well as the information contained, are fabricated as a part of the research process and are held constant for all
9 As a convenience sample rather than a popularization based sample, MTurk samples face many traditional generalizability problems; on average, MTurk samples are more educated, white, young, liberal and underemployed than the general domestic population, although they are generally representative of common internet users (Paolacci & Chandler, 2014). However, these problems are not unique to MTurk; rather, many scholars have recognized that even traditionally representative experimental subject pools are often unrepresentative of actual underlying populations (i.e. overreliance on WEIRD populations, see Henrich et al, 2010; Gosling et al, 2010). Moreover, many scholars have used samples drawn from MTurk and have found high levels of successful replication of traditional experimental work (Berinsky et al., 2012; Casler et al., 2013; Crump et al., 2013; Clifford et al., 2015). 10 Respondents were recruited through MTurk and directed to an externally hosted Qualtrics survey. As a condition of completing the survey, respondents receive nominal reimbursement for their participation. 710 potential respondents accessed the survey link, but 59 respondents either failed to complete the survey, spent insufficient time completing the task, or did not successfully complete two attention check screener questions (Berinsky, et al., 2014). In addition, 169 of the 651 respondents did not successfully answer a post-treatment manipulation check question. However, to prevent addition bias of the sample, and to report the most conservative effect sizes possible, these 169 respondents are left in the sample. A robustness exercise without these respondents is included in the online supplement, and verifies the substantive and empirical findings of the full dataset. 76 respondents. Only the office the candidate is seeking is allowed to vary randomly between participants as a treatment condition.
For the first treatment condition, participants view a website for a candidate running for a position on city council. For the second treatment, the race is changed to a congressional election.11 Between both treatments, the name and image of the candidate, as well as the aesthetic design of the website, remained constant. The designs used as treatment conditions are shown in Figures 4.1 and 4.2, respectively.
Through the use of ‘hot spot’ questions, respondents are asked first, to select the link they would most likely access, and second, to select each link they are likely to visit.12
While the website is presented as a static image, each link selected by the respondent is highlighted to visually distinguish the selection to the respondent, and recorded for analysis.
11 These offices were selected for several specific reasons: First, congressional races and city council races represent some of the most common races in their respective electoral levels. Second, both are selection mechanisms to legislative bodies, which minimizes differences between the role of elected officials in the policymaking process. Third, while congressional and city council races are readably recognizable, the candidates running in such races are not. By using these specific races, as opposed to recognizable executive positions in government such as gubernatorial elections, I can credibly create a fictionalized candidate without significant likelihood of such fictionalization being readily apparent to respondents. This allows me to credibly create a candidate as part of the treatments, and thereby bypass a variety of candidate-level home-grown priors that can bias estimation of the treatment effect. 12 Hot spot questions are designed to allow researchers to collect data based on image stimuli. These questions allow respondents to interact directly with pre-determined sections of researcher created images. As part of the design process, each section of the facsimile website was created as a separate hot spot area. When shown the question, respondents can click on specific sections of the image in response to instructional prompts; data on respondent clicks and selections are stored by the question for future data processing. 77
Figure 4.1: Experiment 1 Local Treatment Condition
Figure 4.2: Experiment 1 Congressional Treatment Condition
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Sample Characteristics
The univariate characteristics of the sample are both common to samples drawn from MTurk, as well as balanced across treatment conditions. Overall, respondents were more likely to be male (56%), under the age of 34 (57%), and have a college degree
(57%). As a result, it is clear that this sample is not completely representative of the U.S. voting population. However, this sample is generally representative of previous samples that have been drawn from the population of MTurk users, and is substantively more representative than traditionally used convenience samples.
In addition, respondent characteristics seem to be balanced across treatment conditions.13 Chi-square statistics between treatments revealed no significant differences between treatment groups in regards to sex, education level, age, political knowledge, partisan identification, prior voting history, or interest in politics.
Experimentally Manipulated Variables
As part of each treatment image, ten ‘links’ are presented to participants. Building on the political information and heuristic literatures, four of these links correspond to information acquisition behavior, and four correspond to commonly used heuristics.
Information links include “On the Issues,” “Experience & Qualifications,” “Issue Voting,” and “Recent News.” Measures of heuristic use include “Political Party Activity,”
“Endorsements,” “About,” and “Photos”.
Each of the information links correspond to detailed information that would require higher levels of systematic consideration or cognitive processing. For example, links such
13 The full balance table showing covariates broken down by treatment condition is provided in the Chapter 4 appendix. 79 as on the issues or issue voting would provide voters with detailed policy positions that allow members of the electorate to systematically compare a candidate to others in the electoral field. In addition, information on a candidates experience and qualification allow voters to draw between-candidate comparisons on expertise and fitness for office.
Similarly, campaign press releases, announcements, or other forms of recent news also provide significantly higher levels of detail than traditional present in heuristic cues.
The heuristic items, however, require much less systematic processing in order to draw credible inferences. The political party activity and endorsement links directly correspond to two of the most scholarly recognized and empirically verified political heuristics. Similarly, the information conditioned in the about and photos links strongly correspond to demographic and appearance heuristics, respectively.
The primary dependent variable is a dichotomous measure indicating if the link the respondent identified as they one they would most likely access corresponds with an information or heuristic source. This measure is used in a series of difference-in-means and statistical regression models.
Experiment 1 Results
The difference-in-means results for the dichotomous measure of links identified as most likely to access is shown in Figure 4.3. The difference-in-means test shows a clear electoral effect: For information use, respondents in the local treatment were significantly more likely to use information than those in the national treatment. 82% of respondents in the local condition identified an information link as the one they were most likely to access, compared to only 75% of respondents in the national condition. 80
Figure 4. 3: Probability of Acquiring Information & Using Heuristics
The opposite effect is observed for heuristic use: respondents in the national condition were substantively and significantly more likely to use heuristics than respondents in the local condition. 24% of national-treatment respondents indicated a heuristic source as their most important link, while only 16% of subjects in the local condition responded similarly.
These difference-in-mean scores indicate a clear electoral effect of between 7 and
8 points. From these treatment effects, it is readily apparent that electoral level can significantly affect a voter’s decision to rely on heuristics or to acquire additional information for cognitive processing. While, all else being equal, voters in both conditions are more likely to use information sources than heuristic links, those in local conditions are significantly more likely to acquire information above and beyond their national- election counterparts; similarly, those in national campaigns are much more likely to rely on heuristics. In addition, the effect of electoral level appears to be most pronounced on 81 the sources respondents’ identity as most important, or those they would be most likely to access.
Figure 4.4 portrays the disaggregated results for respondent selection of the link they would most likely access. These results mirror those found by the difference-in- means tests. In each of the four measures of heuristic use, respondents in the national condition were more likely to indicate likely access than respondents in the local treatment. Interestingly, three information sources do not portray significant differences between treatment groups: almost equivalent (and statistically indistinguishable) number of respondents from each group selected experience and qualifications, issue voting, and news as the links they would be most likely to access. For the on the issues link, however, respondents in the local condition significantly exceeded respondents in the national condition; while 47% of local-condition respondents indicated on the issues as the most important link, only 38% of respondents in the national treatment showed similar likely access. 82
Figure 4. 4: Most Important Links by Treatment Condition
To evaluate the robustness of these findings, the effect of the treatment is examined in a series of logistic regressions utilizing a variety of collected covariates; the results of these models are presented in Table 4.1. In each of six models, the effect of exposure to treatment conditions is statistically significant and in the predicted direction.
In each model, exposure to national campaign conditions has a significant negative effect on information acquisition and a significant positive effect on heuristic use. Moreover, the effect of the treatment holds even when traditional explanations of cognitive processes, such as education, interest in politics, and partisanship, are controlled. 83
Table 4. 1: Multivariate Logistic Regression Robustness Checks
Dependent variable: Information Acquisition Heuristic Use (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) National Treatment -0.460** -0.465** -0.478** 0.519*** 0.536*** 0.551*** (0.193) (0.199) (0.200) (0.198) (0.204) (0.205) Political Knowledge 0.698*** 0.741*** -0.546** -0.596** (0.256) (0.259) (0.266) (0.269) Previous Voting Behavior -0.342 -0.428 0.288 0.438 (0.290) (0.309) (0.298) (0.318) Local Voting Behavior 0.094 -0.147 (0.088) (0.090) Party ID 0.007 0.016 -0.023 -0.036 (0.047) (0.048) (0.048) (0.049) Interest in Politics 0.101 0.098 -0.028 -0.011 (0.109) (0.115) (0.112) (0.119) Education -0.039 0.031 (0.117) (0.120) Age -0.114 0.138* (0.081) (0.082) Constant 1.538*** 0.861* 1.049* -1.646*** -1.275*** -1.420** (0.145) (0.467) (0.614) (0.150) (0.486) (0.634) Observations 651 625 624 651 625 624 Log Likelihood -336.024 -316.597 -314.917 -324.757 -307.708 -305.046 Akaike Inf. Crit. 676.047 645.194 647.834 653.514 627.416 628.091 Note: *p**p***p<0.01
In addition, to ensure that the calculated treatment effect are not attributive to prior experience or sophistication not controlled by the randomization process, I also include covariate measures of respondents political knowledge and prior experience voting in local elections. It could be the case that, as a result of their higher resources and cognitive capacity, those with higher levels of political knowledge or greater political involvement would, all else being equal, engage in higher information consumption than their less- sophisticated counterparts. However, the regression results clearly indicate that electoral 84 level has an effect above and beyond voter capacity or familiarity with local government:
While there is some evidence of heterogeneous treatment magnitude, even when these measures are included, the treatment effect remains significant in the expected directions.
From this experiment it is clear than there is an electoral effect to an individual’s strategic decision to pursue detailed information acquisition or rely on simplification heuristics: voters in local and national treatments portrayed systematically different types of cognitive processing behaviors. Voters in local elections are significantly more likely to use information sources than those in national campaigns. Similarly, while voters in the national campaign treatment were still likely to use information, significantly more national-condition respondents relied on heuristics than their local-condition counterparts.
This provides some of the first evidence of the ability of institutional and electoral differences between races at different levels of government to affect the process through which individuals use information to arrive at cognitive decisions. Moreover, this demonstrates the key advantages and insights scholars can obtain by focusing on how environmental factors can affect individual strategic cognitive behavior.
IV. Experiment 2: Analyzing the Type and Amount of Information Consumed In addition to understanding how voters select between different cognitive strategies, I wish to understand how voters determine the quantity and characteristics of information they utilize when evaluating candidates. To do so, I conduct an original experiment to measure the effect of electoral level on the amount and types of information voters choose to access during a political campaign.
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Description & Data
To examine the effect of electoral level on the type and amount of information voters access, I conduct a four stage experiment using an online convenience sample of
751 respondents. As part of the survey process, respondents are presented with an advertisement for a fictionalized political candidate; as in Experiment 1, the office the candidate is seeking is allowed to vary randomly as a treatment condition.
In the first stage of the experiment, respondents are shown an advertisement for a fictionalized candidate. The candidate mailer-style advertisements used as treatment conditions are shown in Figures 4.5 and 4.6. In the second stage, after viewing the treatment vignette respondents complete an initial candidate evaluation, indicating their likelihood of supporting the candidate. Specifically, this measure asks each respondent to rate their likelihood of supporting the candidate on a 10-point scale. This measure establishes a baseline pre-information likelihood of support.
Figure 4. 5: Experiment 2 Local Treatment Condition
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Figure 4. 6: Experiment 2 Congressional Treatment Condition
In the third stage of the experiment, each voter is presented with a sequential information board containing 12 separate pieces of information about the candidate.
When presented with the information board, voters are asked first, to select the link they would most likely access, and second, to select each link they are likely to visit. After indicating each piece of information they would like to view, voters are presented with short information segments corresponding to their self-selected information sources.
As shown in Figure 4.7, each of the twelve links available to voters can provide important and, importantly, externally realistic, information about a candidate and their position on important issues:
Five items correspond to higher order information consumption, and concern the specific details of the individual policy issues; these items include ‘tax policy,’ ‘criminal justice issues,’ ‘education policy,’ ‘economic development,’ and ‘health policy.’ Each of 87 these information links corresponds to detailed information that would likely require higher levels of systematic consideration or cognitive processing. By selecting one of these links, voters are self-selecting into specific consideration of policy-specific information. While this type of information provides significant amounts of formal information that would allow voters to systematically compare a candidate’s position with both the voter’s idiosyncratic preferences and the policies of other candidates in the field, it also requires much higher levels of formal or systematic cognitive consideration.
Figure 4. 7: Experiment 2 Information Board
Four items in the information board directly correspond to well-documented political heuristics; these include ‘endorsements,’ ‘political party activity,’ ‘group membership,’ and ‘photos.’ As political heuristics, these allow voters to draw influential political information with minimal cognitive processing requirements. 88
The remaining three items (‘about me,’ ‘experience and qualifications,’ and
‘campaign news’) require a moderate amount of systematic information processing; these types of information would require more cognitive attention that simply employing a heuristic, but do not rise to the cognitive complexity of formal issue consideration.
After selecting each piece of information they consider important or would like to view, respondents are provided with a short two to three sentence summary of the candidate’s information corresponding to that category. Importantly, the content of each information link is held constant across treatment groups. As a result, the content of each information section was drafted specifically to apply across electoral levels and institutional contexts. For example, regardless of the electoral level of the randomized treatment, all voters that selected ‘tax policy’ as an important piece of information received the following stimulus:
Alex on Taxes: “No one likes paying taxes; citizens should be able
to keep as much of their money as possible. Unfortunately, taxes are
a necessary requirement for providing important government
services to our communities. Government officials, however, have
the strongest obligation to be good stewards of the public’s money,
and to make sure each penny is put to good use.”
After reading each selected item, voters are asked to perform the candidate evaluation task a second time. This measure establishes each respondent’s likelihood of supporting the candidate after they have received additional information about the candidate and their positions.
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Experiment 2 Results
As expected, the electoral level of office the candidate is seeking has a substantive and significant effect on a voter’s information search behavior. As shown in Figure 4.8, voters that viewed an advertisement featuring a candidate running for a local-level office were more likely to access additional levels of information than their national-election counterparts; on average, voters in a city council treatment accessed 0.39 more links than voters in congressional election treatments. Respondents in local government conditions selected to access approximately 47% of the total amount of information links available; respondents in national conditions, however, selected only 43% of available links.
Figure 4. 8: Effect of Level of Office on Information Acquisition
To evaluate the robustness of these findings, the effect of electoral level and pre- information evaluation are examined in a series of multivariate regressions utilizing a 90 variety of collected individual covariates; the results of these models are presented in
Table 4.2. In each model, the effect of exposure to a national treatment is statistically significant and in the predicted direction; in each specification, voters that are exposed to a national candidate are estimated to consume less pieces of information than voters in a municipal election. Moreover, the effect of the treatment holds even when traditional explanations of cognitive processes, such as education, interest in politics, and partisanship, are controlled. 91
Table 4. 2: Amount of Information Accessed Robustness Checks
Dependent variable: Amount of Information Accessed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Exposure to National Candidate -0.389** -0.426** -0.410** (0.198) (0.196) (0.194) Exposure to Female Candidate -0.184 -0.209 -0.255 (0.198) (0.196) (0.194) Pre-Information Evaluation -0.218*** -0.211*** -0.157*** (0.050) (0.049) (0.050) Previous Turnout Behavior 0.295 0.244 (0.266) (0.268) Party ID -0.125*** -0.118** (0.047) (0.047) Interest in Politics 0.454*** 0.292*** (0.102) (0.107) Education -0.028 (0.121) Age -0.033 (0.082) Political Knowledge 1.268*** (0.247) Constant 5.645*** 5.543*** 6.581*** 5.322*** 4.931*** (0.139) (0.139) (0.276) (0.511) (0.644) Observations 751 751 751 719 715 R2 0.005 0.001 0.025 0.076 0.110 Adjusted R2 0.004 -0.0002 0.024 0.068 0.099 Note: *p**p***p<0.01
In addition to the quantity of information voters acquire, I examine the types of links voters choose to use when evaluating candidates. It is readily apparent that electoral level has a significant effect on the types of information sources voters view in order to gain additional knowledge on political candidates. Overall, as shown in Figure 4.9, voters in congressional treatment conditions viewed almost 6% less of available policy specific detailed information sources. On average, city council voters accessed approximately 92
3.25 of the available 5 policy specific information sources; congressional voters only accessed 2.95 policy sources. In terms of specific issues, voters in city council elections were significantly more likely to access information on a candidate’s position on tax policy and criminal justice; voters in city council races were also marginally significantly more likely to access information on a candidate’s education position.
Figure 4. 9: Electoral Level on Detailed Information Searches
V. Conclusion From this research, several points become clear. First, it is clear than there is an electoral effect to an individual’s strategic decision to pursue detailed information acquisition or rely on simplification heuristics: voters in local and national treatments portrayed systematically different types of cognitive processing behaviors. Voters in local elections are significantly more likely to use information sources than those in national campaigns. Similarly, while voters in the national campaign treatment were still likely to 93 use information, significantly more national-condition respondents relied on heuristics than their local-condition counterparts.
This provides some of the first evidence of the ability of institutional and electoral differences between races at different levels of government to affect the process through which individuals use information to arrive at cognitive decisions. Moreover, this demonstrates the key advantages and insights scholars can obtain by focusing on how environmental factors can affect individual strategic cognitive behavior.
Finally, it is also clear that this topic deserves further scholarly exploration, particularly in the context of local government. In order to fully understand the process through which individuals make politically important voting decisions, we must determine how these decisions are made for candidates throughout the ballot. In this chapter, each experiment was designed to fully equalize all differences between the decisions faced by voters except the specific level of office being sought by the candidate. As argued throughout this work, and as quantified in Chapter 3, there are many more environmental and electoral differences that may affect voter cognitive processing. In Chapter 5, I further consider the role of electoral level in voter decision processes, and how important institutional and electoral differences can mitigate or reinforce voters’ strategic cognitive processes, by allowing additional elements of the electoral environment, such as the cost and magnitude of available information, to affect voter decision making. 94
Chapter 5: Candidates and Information Complexity: Examining the Effects of Information Cost and Magnitude on Voter Decision Making
Chapter Summary: When evaluating candidates at different positions on the ballot, voters encounter dramatically different information environments. Candidates seeking popular statewide positions or seats in Congress enjoy significant media attention, exposure, name recognition, and campaign support. Candidates for local offices, however, often experience a very different electoral environment, with minimal media coverage and little external support. These differences can have a dramatic effect on the information environment voters encounter when seeking details about candidates. In this chapter, I use an original experiment to identify the effects of electoral level and information costs and magnitude on voter cognitive processing. I find clear evidence of the importance of electoral level, but identify that the effects of costs and information magnitude are more nuanced.
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I. Introduction Recall the scenario that began the previous chapter: a pair of candidates simultaneously running for positions at both the top and bottom of the ballot, with identical campaigns and identical information for voters to consider. Such a situation is clearly unrealistic, as candidates rarely appear in multiple positions on a ballot, much less simultaneously in well-known top of the ballot positions and obscure offices in local government. However, there is another important element of that scenario that is not mirrored in the reality of vote experience: the equivalence of available information for candidates at the top and bottom of the ballot.
In Chapter 4, I presented some of the first evidence that the level of office being sought by a candidate can have a dramatic effect on voter cognitive processing, even without specific consideration of change in the cost or accessibility of information. While an important first step, such analysis cannot account for the substantial differences in information environments found across electoral contexts. In this chapter, I extend this work by recognizing that the environments found in local and national elections are not equal. Instead, significant differences in the cost and magnitude of available information can mediate the relationship between the candidates listed on a ballot and the voters seeking to learn about their would-be representatives. Through the use of an original factorial experiment that randomizes the level of office being sought by a candidate, as well as the costs and magnitude of information, I attempt to identify how changes in the electoral environment can mediate the effect of electoral level on voter information acquisition.
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II. Examining Differences in Costs and Information Magnitude Building on insights from the cognitive rationality literature, I argue in Chapter 2 that changes in electoral level can alter the cost and benefits of acquiring information, the magnitude of available information, as well as the complexity of the cognitive environment. As a result of these alterations and the subsequent change in the cost and benefits of different cognitive tools, citizens will alter their cognitive strategies in response to changing environmental conditions. The anticipated effects of electoral level on a voter’s cognitive information environment are detailed in Table 5.1. First, there are systematic differences in the cost of acquiring additional information across electoral contexts. In national campaigns, candidates often have many campaign events, detailed websites, issue profiles, prior legislative voting behavior, and substantial media coverage.
As a result, voters seeking additional information on a candidate or a race are often only required to complete a simple Google search. In local elections, however, such a process is unlikely to be sufficient. As shown by the experimental and aggregate results in Chapter
3, while some local candidates may have websites local candidates are systematically characterized by lower levels of media exposure and less well-established histories in public office; as a result, local election voters must pay much higher costs to access new information about a candidate.
Second, electoral level can have a significant effect on the magnitude of information available by affecting both the amount of information voters possess about a candidate or race prior to the decision task, as well as the total amount of information upon which voters can base their decision. In high magnitude elections, such as those for well-known federal offices, voters likely passively receive high amounts of information prior to recognizing the need to make a decision. In these high-information availability 97 campaign environments, voters can easily become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data upon which to make decisions. In local election environments, however, such magnitude is unlikely to manifest: Voters generally have little knowledge about candidates for local office prior to a campaign, and there is overall less information available upon which to make decisions.
Table 5. 1: The Effect of Electoral Level on Voter Information Environments
Third, the complexity of the decision environment can be significantly affected by the type of election in which a voter is participating. Complex decision environments occur when individual receive mixed or conflicting information upon which to make a decision.
In local elections, individuals have, all else being equal, less available information upon which to make decisions; as a result of these information deficiencies, there is less opportunity for information to contradict or create complexity in the decision task. In federal elections, however, there is a much higher likelihood of conflicting information. In order to maximize the likelihood of electoral success, candidates and parties alike are incentivized to engage in widespread information distribution that their candidate is the most preferable or has the most favored stance on a slate of important issues. When aggregated across different parties each engaging in similar behavior, voters can easily be exposed to different sources that are fundamentally contradictory. As a result, these 98 elections are often characterized by candidates and political parties attempting to simplify voter’s decision tasks through reliance on partisan heuristics and motivated reasoning.
Each of these characteristics would support the ability of electoral level to affect the costs and benefits of information acquisition, as well as the complexity of the cognitive environment. As a result, I expect:
Hypothesis 1: Voters will acquire more information in local elections than
in national elections.
Hypothesis 2: Voters will be more likely to acquire detailed information in
local elections than in national elections.
In addition to affecting the amount of information voters acquire, environmental characteristics such as information magnitude should have an effect on the cognitive strategies voters use to consider candidates. In high magnitude races, where voters are highly likely to already possess some information about a candidate, the comparative benefit of acquiring additional details is diminished. By the virtue of having prior knowledge about a candidate, voters are less reliant on the need to bear substantial information costs in order to make an accurate or meaningful decision. Moreover, acquiring additional information when the voter is already somewhat informed can significantly increase the likelihood of encountering conflicting information. Particularly in cognitively complex information environments, such as is often found in large campaigns, a substantial amount of information is complex or contradictory. Thus, by acquiring additional information about a candidate, voters significantly increase the likelihood of encountering information that differs from what they already know, further increasing the 99 cognitive burden of the decision by requiring the voter to short through conflicting details.
Thus, I expect:
Hypothesis 3: Independent of electoral level, voters with prior information
about a candidate will engage in less information search behaviors than
voters without prior information.
Similarly, independent increases in the cost of information should, all else equal, result in less voters pursuing systemic information acquisition and consideration. As noted in the cognitive decision model presented in Chapter 2, the costs of using a particular cognitive strategy have a direct effect on the probability of a voter using that tool to make decisions about a candidate. As a result, I expect:
Hypothesis 4: Independent of electoral level, as the cost of information
acquisition increases, voters will engage in less information search
behaviors.
Finally, I contend that the totality of the effect of electoral level on a voter’s cognitive strategies is not determined solely by the cost or magnitude of available information. As a result, even when controlling for differences in the cost or accessibility of information, conditions of local government will still see significant increase both in total information and the amount of policy-centric information voters consume. Key to this process is the distinction made in the previous chapter between the different types of environmental effects: while changes in the cost or availability of information may reinforce or mediate the environment as an information source, it does not diminish the motivating influence of the electoral environment. 100
Hypothesis 5: The effect of electoral level will exert an effect independent
of the cost or magnitude of available information.
III. Experimental Methods and Measures To examine the effects of electoral level and the characteristics of a decision environment on the cognitive strategies voters use when selecting candidates, I perform an original multistage survey experiment using a 2x2x2 factorial design. In total, 768 participants were recruited from a commonly used online survey platform to take part in the experiment.14 As part of the experiment, each participant is exposed to a fictionalized candidate for public office and provided the opportunity to acquire additional information about that candidate before making a decision. The office being sought by the candidate, the presence or absence of prior information, and the cost of a voter’s information search is allowed to vary randomly as treatment conditions.
There are several advantages to such a design. Outside of a controlled experimental environment, scholars are limited to observing (or, more often, asking participants to self-report) information acquisition behaviors and measuring voter’s self- reported candidate selections. However, it is much more difficult, if not impossible, to examining the nuances of cognitive processing in electoral decision making outside of controlled informational environments. In purely observational studies, scholars cannot separately identify the independent effects of the nature of a voter’s decision task, and the characteristics of the environment in which the decision is made. However, through the use of multiple treatment factors, this design allows to independently measure the
14 Mean comparison statistics indicate the sample is equally balanced across the eight treatment groups in regards to individual and political characteristics such as gender, education, age, and political knowledge. A full balance table is presented in the appendix. 101 effects of changes in the scope of the decision task, as well as the characteristics of the decision environment, on a voter’s decision making process.
After answering survey batteries collecting demographic information, political attitudes, political knowledge, and need for cognition, each respondent participated in a six-stage experiment to evaluate a candidate for political office. The specific designs of the treatments, as well as the stages in the experimental design, include:
Stage 1: Exposure to a Candidate
In the first stage of the experiment, respondents are shown an advertisement for a fictionalized candidate. The electoral level of office the candidate is seeking is allowed to vary randomly; all other characteristics of the ad, including the name and image of the candidate, as well as the aesthetic design of the advertisement, remain constant. Half of respondents viewed an advertisement for a candidate seeking election to a local city council, while half received an ad for a candidate in a congressional race; these treatment conditions are shown in Figure 5.1 and 5.2, respectively. Importantly, these offices are selected for several specific reasons: First, congressional races and city council races represent some of the most common races in their respective electoral levels. Second, both are selection mechanisms for single members to multimember collaborative legislative bodies, which minimize differences between the roles of elected officials in the policymaking process. Third, while congressional and city council races are readably recognizable, the candidates running in such races are not. By using these specific races, as opposed to recognizable executive positions in government such as gubernatorial elections, I can credibly create a fictionalized candidate without significant likelihood of such fictionalization being readily apparent to respondents. This allows me to credibly 102 create a candidate as part of the treatments, and thereby bypass a variety of candidate- level home-grown priors that can bias estimation of the treatment effect.
Figure 5. 1: Local Candidate Treatment
Figure 5. 2: Congressional Candidate Treatment
Stage 2: Pre-Information Candidate Evaluation
After viewing the treatment vignette, respondents are asked to complete an initial candidate evaluation, indicating their likelihood of supporting the candidate. This measure 103 establishes a baseline pre-information likelihood of support, which can be compared to their post-information evaluation to create a within-subject measure of the effect of information acquisition on voter decision making.
Stage 3: Information Magnitude & Preexisting Information
After completing a pre-information evaluation, half of respondents receive a paragraph of additional information about the candidate and their policy positions; the remaining half of respondents do not receive this information. Thus, when later asked to perform an information search about their candidate, half of respondents will have already been exposed to some information about the candidate. This represents high magnitude electoral environments, where voters will likely have passively encountered details about a candidate independent of a realized search for political information. Other respondents did not receive any additional a-priori or free information, representing low magnitude elections with a scarce information environment. This information asymmetry between randomized conditions allows for the direct comparison of the effect of information magnitude on voter information acquisition and decision making.
Stage 4: Information Board
Next, respondents are provided the opportunity to learn more information about the candidate through a interactive information board. The information board contains several links to pieces of information voters may find helpful in evaluating the candidate.
In total, twenty pieces of information are contained on the board.
Unlike the information boards used in the experiments presented in Chapter 4, the board used in this experiment is fully interactive. Respondents are free to click on an information link, and are then instantly provided a small popup containing the information. 104
Thus, respondents do not have to choose the information they will access prior to accessing it, and the information itself can dynamically affect subsequent information acquisition behaviors. This information board, as well as a sample information prompt, is shown in Figures 5.3 and 5.4, respectively.
Figure 5. 3: Interactive Information Board
Figure 5. 4: Sample Information Item
Some items on the information board correspond to higher order information consumption, and concern the specific details of the individual policy issues; this includes items such as ‘tax policy,’ ‘criminal justice issues,’ ‘education policy,’ ‘economic development,’ and ‘health policy.’ Each of these information links corresponds to detailed information that would likely require higher levels of systematic consideration or cognitive processing. By selecting one of these links, voters are self-selecting into specific consideration of policy-specific information. While this type of information provides 105 significant amounts of formal information that would allow voters to systematically compare a candidate’s position with both the voter’s idiosyncratic preferences and the policies of other candidates in the field, it also requires much higher levels of formal or systematic cognitive consideration.
Other items in the information board directly correspond to well-documented political heuristics, such as ‘endorsements,’ ‘political party activity,’ ‘group membership,’
‘religion,’ and ‘photos.’ As political heuristics, these allow voters to draw influential political information with minimal cognitive processing requirements.
The remaining items are elements that require more cognitive consideration than heuristics, but less than detailed policy consideration; these items include characteristics such as the candidate’s experience, biography, motivation for running, and campaign news.
After selecting each piece of information they consider important or would like to view, respondents are provided with a short two to three sentence summary of the candidate’s information corresponding to that category. Importantly, the content of each information link will be held constant across treatment groups. As a result, the content of each information section is drafted specifically to apply across electoral levels and institutional contexts.
Half of respondents are allowed to view the information board without any consideration of information cost. Other respondents, however, are constrained in their information search. To induce cost, voters randomized into a cost condition have a fixed probability (p=0.33) of a piece of information appearing blank, representing a failed information search; a sample ‘missing information’ is shown in Figure 5.5. Thus, a 106 respondent who selects an item that turns out to actually be blank has invested time, but has not gained any informative benefit from that search. Since the information board is the only location voters can find information about the (fictionalized) candidate, voters are not able to independently access any information deemed missing by the cost treatment.
Figure 5. 5: Sample Missing Information Item
Stage 5: Post-Information Candidate Evaluation
After reading their selected information, voters are asked to perform the candidate evaluation task a second time. This measure establishes each respondent’s likelihood of supporting the candidate after they have received additional information about the candidate and their positions.
Stage 6: Voter Information Evaluation
Finally, voters complete a task indicating the relative importance of each piece of information they asked on the information board. This stage allows examination of the relative usefulness of different pieces of information across varying electoral and informational contexts. Specifically, voters are asked first to identify the five most important or influential pieces of information accessed, and then to comparatively rank the top five from most to least important.15
15 Voters who accessed at least one but less than 5 links were asked solely to rank the links they accessed from most to least important. Voters that did not access any links did not participate in this portion of the task. 107
IV. The Effect of Electoral Levels on Total Amount of Information Accessed First, I begin by conducting an operational replication of the results found in
Chapter 4 by measuring the direct effect of electoral level on the amount of information voters access. Independent of electoral level, voters accessed an average of approximately 35.3% of available information, or approximately 7 of the available 20 links.
However, as shown in Figure 5.6, there is a significant difference between the total number of links accessed by voters in the local and congressional treatments. Voters in the local condition accessed on average 7.52 links, or 37.6%, while congressional voters accessed an average of 6.57, or 32.9% of the available information items. Substantively, this difference is quite striking: voters in local conditions accessed, on average, one additional piece of information than their national-candidate counterparts, which represents a 14.3% increase in information exposure.
Figure 5. 6: Effect of Electoral Level on Amount of Information Accessed
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These findings provide additional support for hypothesis 1, as well as confirming the findings of the experiments presented in chapter 4. In this experiment, voters accessed a smaller percentage of the information available, but that is likely due to increasing the number of items on the information board from 12 to 20. Interestingly, the effect of electoral level in this experiment is even stronger than found previously, as voters are estimated to acquire an additional full information item about candidates running for local government.
A multivariate robustness check on these findings is presented in Table 5.2. As in chapter 4, the effect of electoral level on the amount of information accessed holds through a variety of model specifications, including models with measures of individual level political and demographic characteristics. Through a wide range of models, exposure to a congressional candidate results in a significant decrease in the total number of links accessed by information-seekers.
The difference in the likelihood of accessing information by the cognitive sophistication required to process the item is shown in Figure 5.7. Regardless of electoral level, respondents accessed a greater percentage of detailed policy information items
(39.9%) than either moderate information items (33.5%) or heuristics (31.4%). While the rates at which the city council and congressional treatment conditions accessed heuristic items are statistically indistinguishable (at 32% and 30%, respectively), significant differences do emerge for the moderate and detailed policy information items. On average, respondents in the congressional treatment condition accessed only 29.8% of moderate information items, while respondents in the city council condition accessed approximately 37% of those items. Thus, respondents in the city council condition 109 accessed almost 24% more moderate information than their congressional-election peers; this difference is statistically significant at conventional levels. Similar, if slightly smaller, effects are found for the probability of accessing detailed policy information items.
Respondents randomized to view city council candidates accessed, on average, 42.5% of detailed policy items, while congressional voters accessed only 37.1%; substantively, city council voters accessed 14.5% more detailed information than voters participating in a federal election.16
Table 5. 2: Amount of Information Accessed Robustness Checks
Dependent variable: Amount of Information Accessed (1) (2) (3) Exposure to Congressional Candidate -0.945** -0.931** -0.873** (0.391) (0.383) (0.385) Political Knowledge 1.084*** 1.076*** (0.150) (0.151) Previous Voting Behavior -0.282 -0.223 (0.737) (0.796) Party ID 0.047 0.032 (0.089) (0.090) Interest in Politics -0.059 -0.096 (0.218) (0.229) Education -0.456** (0.232) Age 0.184 (0.168) Local Voting Behavior 0.070 (0.173) Constant 7.519*** 1.341 2.373 (0.272) (1.279) (1.463) Observations 768 741 739 R2 0.008 0.075 0.082 Adjusted R2 0.006 0.069 0.072 Note: *p**p***p<0.01
16 This difference is also statistically significant at conventional levels. 110
Figure 5. 7: Probability of Accessing Information Item by Cognitive Requirement
The difference in the likelihood of accessing information for all of the twenty items is shown in Figure 5.8. Unsurprisingly, many items corresponding to moderate information or detailed policy positions show significant differences: Voters in local conditions are significantly more likely to access information about a candidate’s experience, occupation, motivation for running, and economic development policy. Similar substantive effects are also found for the differences for health policy, tax policy, and candidate age, although these measures are only marginally significant. Interestingly, none of the twenty information items were more likely to be accessed by congressional voters.
Together, these results indicate substantial support in favor of hypotheses 1 and
2. Voters participating in local elections not only access greater quantities of information, but the increase is concentrated on information requiring moderate or significant cognitive investment. 111
Figure 5. 8: Differences in the Likelihood of Accessing Information
Less support, however, is found in favor of hypotheses 3 and 4. As shown in Figure
5.9, subjecting voters to increases in the cost of information or providing prior information does not dramatically affect the total number of links they access. Indeed, as shown in
Table 5.3, these characteristics do not seem to play the anticipated role in determining the amount of information voters acquire about candidates on their ballot. 112
Figure 5. 9: Effect of Information Costs & Magnitude
In terms of costs, voters in conditions involving information costs accessed slightly more information, although the difference is not statistically disguisable. Speculatively, there are several reasons why this pattern may emerge. It could be the case that voters have an information floor, or a minimum amount of information they desire prior to making a decision. As a result, voters that are unable to find a particular piece of information due to high costs may instead acquire another, more easily obtained piece of data. However, this would fly in direct contradiction to a long line of psychological literature on voter information behavior. Instead, it is likely that the lack of results, and indeed the slight increase in information accessed by respondents in the cost condition, is an artifact of the experimental manipulation of costs. In this design, high cost information is simply missing, with the experiment providing readers a short statement testifying exactly to that effect.
As a result, costs in this methodology are both easily identified and relatively novel. In 113 reality, however, the absence of information about a candidate is much harder to identify.
Instead of a quick prompt indicating that a specific piece of information is unavailable, voters must potentially trudge through newspaper articles, social media pages, and online websites before coming to the conclusion themselves that the information is unavailable; this process is, of course, a much higher cost endeavor than is modeled in this design. It could also be the case that the inclusion of a missing-information prompt message itself motivated some voters to click on more information than they otherwise would have, as an exercise to identify exactly how much information about the candidate is absent.
Table 5. 3: Multivariate Effects of Information Costs and Magnitude
Dependent variable: Amount of Information Accessed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Information Costs 0.555 0.570 0.552 (0.392) (0.384) (0.384) Prior Information -0.358 -0.426 -0.462 (0.392) (0.384) (0.385) Political Knowledge 1.095*** 1.084*** 1.092*** 1.083*** (0.150) (0.152) (0.150) (0.152) Previous Voting Behavior -0.225 -0.159 -0.215 -0.154 (0.738) (0.797) (0.739) (0.798) Party ID 0.058 0.040 0.063 0.046 (0.089) (0.090) (0.089) (0.090) Interest in Politics -0.058 -0.098 -0.051 -0.090 (0.219) (0.229) (0.219) (0.229) Education -0.463** -0.477** (0.232) (0.233) Age 0.212 0.207 (0.168) (0.168) Local Voting Behavior 0.065 0.072 (0.173) (0.174) Constant 6.777*** 0.434 1.499 7.237*** 0.896 2.007 (0.280) (1.279) (1.465) (0.276) (1.267) (1.454) Observations 768 741 739 768 741 739 R2 0.003 0.071 0.078 0.001 0.069 0.077 Adjusted R2 0.001 0.064 0.068 -0.0002 0.063 0.067 Note: *p**p***p<0.01
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Next, I turn to the potential mediating effects information costs and prior information can have on the relationship between voter information processing and electoral level. Importantly, this step provides valuable insights by removing a difficult complication from the prior analysis of the effects of electoral level alone presented in both Chapter 4 and earlier in this chapter. It could be the case that voters have a priori expectations about the cost of acquiring information about local candidates or anticipate having prior knowledge about a candidate for congressional office. If these concerns are not completely empirically addressed by the use of fictionalized candidates and randomization to treatment, it could be the case that the identified effects of electoral level are an artifact of these ingrained biases. Voters could, as a result of their previous experience, have an ingrained belief that it is difficult to acquire information about candidates running for local offices, or that they should (or even that they actually do) know something about a candidate running for Congress. As a result, I preform a series of models including component terms for each of the factors in the experiment; the results of these models are presented in Table 5.4. In summary, including measures for the cost of information or the information already-in-hand does not affect the effect of electoral level on information acquisition. Through a series of model specification, including measures of both information costs and prior information, electoral level remains a significant predictor of the total amount of information voters will acquire.
As a whole, this is a strong amount of support in favor of the role electoral level can play in determining how much information voters are willing to acquire about the candidates on their ballot.
115
Table 5. 4: Mediating Effects of Electoral Level, Information Costs, and Magnitude
Dependent variable: Amount of Information Accessed (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) Exposure to a Congressional Candidate -0.937** -0.952** -0.944** -0.935** -0.879** (0.391) (0.391) (0.391) (0.383) (0.384) Information Costs 0.541 0.561 0.591 0.578 (0.391) (0.391) (0.383) (0.383) Prior Information -0.376 -0.404 -0.472 -0.507 (0.391) (0.391) (0.383) (0.384) Political Knowledge 1.090*** 1.082*** (0.149) (0.151) Prior Voting Behavior -0.264 -0.233 (0.736) (0.795) Party ID 0.043 0.028 (0.089) (0.090) Interest in Politics -0.042 -0.086 (0.218) (0.228) Education -0.458** (0.232) Age 0.188 (0.168) Local Voting Behavior 0.087 (0.173) Constant 7.240*** 7.708*** 7.433*** 1.161 2.213 (0.339) (0.336) (0.387) (1.302) (1.485) Observations 768 768 768 741 739 R2 0.010 0.009 0.011 0.080 0.087 Adjusted R2 0.007 0.006 0.008 0.071 0.074 Note: *p**p***p<0.01
V. Unpacking the Most Important Issues I also examine the specific information items respondents indicated as being most important or influential. After choosing what information to select on the information board and preforming a post-information evaluation, each participant was asked to rank their five most important pieces of information from most to least important. The number of 116 respondents, as well as the relative percentage, selecting each information item as either one of the top five most important or the most important is shown in Table 5.5. Overall, respondents consider health policy to be quite important, with more than half of respondents selecting it in their top five. Other popular choices include experience, political ideology, economic development policy, and political party activity. At the other end of the popularity spectrum, comparatively few respondents chose infrastructure policy, occupation, or photos. Only 35 respondents indicated that group membership is an important item, and no one ranked it as the most important item they would consider.
As shown in Figures 5.10 and 5.11, few descriptive differences emerge between the individual information items respondents use across electoral levels. Voters assigned to the congressional candidate were significantly more likely to list the candidate’s party affiliation as their most important issue. While relatively few participants listed party affiliation as their most important issue (only 16 in the city council condition and 27 in the congressional condition), the difference is statistically significant and represents an increase of approximately 68%. In terms of the top five most important information items, congressional voters were less likely to indicate that economic development policies and information about the candidate’s occupation as important items, and were marginally less likely to rate details about the candidate’s age as important.
117
Table 5. 5: Most Important Information Items
118
Figure 5. 10: Most Important Information Items
119
Figure 5. 11: Top 5 Most Important Information Items
120
VI. Conclusion When evaluating candidates at different positions on the ballot, voters encounter dramatically different information environments. Candidates seeking popular statewide positions or seats in Congress enjoy significant media attention, exposure, name recognition, and campaign support. Candidates for local offices, however, often experience a very different electoral environment, with minimal media coverage and little external support. These differences can have a dramatic effect on the information environment voters encounter when seeking details about candidates. Statewide or national campaigns significantly lower information costs, increase the amount of information available, and increase the complexity of the decision environment. Local elections, on the other hand, are often characterized by dramatically higher information costs, low information magnitude, and little opportunity for cognitive complexity.
Through an original experiment, I examine the effect of these information effects on the cognitive tools voters use when gathering details about their candidate of choice.
In line with previous experiments, I find that voters in local elections attempt to acquire more information than those evaluating federal candidates. Moreover, this effect holds even when measures of information cost and magnitude are controlled for.
The direct effect of cost and magnitude, however, are less clear; in this experiment, neither characteristic significantly affected the amount of information voters access. It is clear, however, that these electoral characteristics are deserving of further scholarly attention. 121
Chapter 6: The Down-Ballot Dilemma 122
The Down-Ballot Dilemma Each time they enter the voting booth, voters are faced with a myriad of choices.
At the top of their ballot, they encounter well-known offices and candidates running for highly visible positions in state and federal government. At the bottom of the ballot, potentially more than a hundred races later, however, they must make meaningful selections for a vast number of important local and municipal contests. Do voters use the same types of cognitive processing strategies when attempting to acquire and process information for candidates across the length of their ballot?
Nationwide, more than 96% of all elected officials are elected to positions in local government. As a result, voters are making far more decisions about the candidates that will occupy these important positions than they are about who will serve in statehouses, or who will tread the halls of Congress. Local officials play a vital role in our political system, wielding significant political authority, creating legislation and policy that has the most direct connection to constituents, and spending vast sums of public money.
However, in spite of the dramatic number of local elections and the considerable influence local candidates have in our political system, few scholars have attempted to empirically examine how citizens actually become informed about the candidates running to fill positions in local government.
When making decisions, such as which candidate to support in an election, voters have contrasting incentives to make an accurate decision and a cognitively easy decision.
To make these decisions, voters can use a series of cognitive processing tools, including performing a detailed information search, relying on pre-cognitive affective judgements, 123 using heuristics and information shortcuts, or using motivated reasoning to conduct an abbreviated information search.
I argue that the strategies voters use when becoming informed about the candidates on their ballot are neither constant or random. Instead, they are strategically chosen as a result of the potential costs and benefits of using a particular cognitive tool.
I contend that the characteristics of the electoral environment can have a significant mediating effect on the cost and benefits of using a set of cognitive strategies, and thus can affect their likelihood of being used.
Through a series of aggregate and experimental studies, I examine how the features and characteristics of local elections mediate the cognitive strategies voters use to become informed about the candidates on their ballot. Overall, I find that:
• Voters encounter significant barriers when attempting to become informed about
the local candidates on their ballot. Candidates for local elections are less likely to
use popular web domains, have their own campaign website, have a Wikipedia
page, or have publicly available information about their experience, qualifications,
patrician activity, and policy positions. When evaluating local candidates, voters
report more difficult information searches, that find less results, than experienced
when evaluating candidates for other types of offices.
• Conditions of local government can significantly alter the cognitive environment in
which voters make decisions. When evaluating candidates for local office, voters
routinely access greater amounts of information than when evaluating candidates
for higher electoral offices. Moreover, voters appear to acquire additional detailed
policy-specific information, such as a candidate’s position on important issues. A 124
series of experiments reveal that electoral level can have a meaningful mediating
effect on citizen information acquisition and cognitive processing.
• The effects of information costs and availability are more nuanced than originally
anticipated. While electoral level has a clear and independent effect on the amount
of information voters use when evaluating candidates, similar relationships are not
found for either information costs or having prior information before beginning an
information search.
These findings have clear implications for scholarly understanding of local elections, and result in a clear dilemma: Voters seek the greatest amount of information in elections that have the highest information costs.
This dilemma also promotes significant questions about the best practices for conducting local elections. There are two primary obstacles that limit the ability of voters to become informed about local candidates: the cost of information, and the multitude of local candidates on the ballot. As empirically demonstrated in Chapter 3, the costs of acquiring information about local candidates is quite high, and the total amount of information available about these candidates is often quite low. However, solving the issue of information costs alone would likely not be sufficient due to the high number of local races on the ballot. If, for example, there are 100 or more races on a ballot, even in a world with absolutely free and complete information, it would still be a costly endeavor for voters to become informed about all of the candidates that appear on their ballot. As a result, policy prescriptions to encourage voters to more meaningfully participate in these electoral contests must consider both the cost of information, as well as the totality of candidates that appear on the ballot. 125
There are, however, many institutional features of ballots and elections that can aid in this effort. From a ballot design perspective, delayed voting methods, such as mail- in voting, may provide voters additional time to become informed about all of the candidates on their ballot. From an election perspective, governmental institutions should reconsider the widespread use of uniform election dates. Local governments, city councils, and school districts often have the authority to schedule their own elections; as a cost saving measure, they often choose to schedule their elections on uniform elections dates, with their candidates appearing on the same ballot as those for other federal, state, and local positions. This dramatically increases the number of candidates on the ballot, and decreases the probability that a voter acquires information about the candidates in a given race. Instead, more frequency elections with fewer contests may help promote a more informed and engaged electorate.
In addition to affecting the institutional features of the ballot, these results can have direct implication for governments, candidates, media organizations, and other non- governmental organizations seeking to promote a more informed local electorate. Due to the comparatively high cost and low magnitude of information environments often present in local elections, features and tools designed to increase information availability and accessibility can likely have a significant effect on voter decision making. Media organizations providing more coverage of local contests and candidates could, for example, increase both the amount of information voters have about the candidates on their ballot while simultaneously raising the perceived importance of the race. Similarly, more widespread use of candidate questionnaires and voting guides would allow 126 candidates for important local positions an easier way to present themselves and their issues before the electorate.
Exploring the Down-Ballot: Building an Agenda for Future Research Exploring a new area of empirical research brings its own unique brand of challenges. However, one key benefit of exploring a previously-underdeveloped line of scholarly inquiry is the promise of many different avenues to explore. I contend that, in the study of cognitive processing in local elections, two such areas are particularly fruitful:
1) understanding the theoretical mechanisms that result in the voters relying on different cognitive strategies for decisions at different theoretical levels, and 2) examining how additional complications found in voter decision tasks can affect cognitive processing in local elections.
First, examining the specific theoretical and causal mechanisms that result in local voters using unique cognitive processes is an important component in understanding how voters select the vast majority of candidates elected to public office. While this research is certainly a step in the right direction, scholars have yet to identify the specific mechanism that cause voters participating in local elections to use a different set of cognitive strategies than voters in other electoral contests. From the results of this project, it seems clear that the causal effects of information costs and magnitude are more nuanced than originally anticipated, and that additional mechanisms are also motivating local election voters to use alternate strategies. As a result, other theoretical mechanisms, such as the complexity of the information environment, deserve scholarly consideration.
Moreover, building upon the environmental information and motivation framework, characteristics that can affect the ability of the environment to serve as a cognitive 127 motivating influence should be explored; if local elections systematically affect the perceived importance of an election or the saliency of affective judgements, it is highly likely that voters will experience a different motivating influence to pursue detailed information consideration.
In addition to exploring specific theoretical and causal mechanisms, additional research is needed to identify how other elements and complications of the electoral environment can affect voter cognitive processing. All of the experiments used in this project are relatively simple, and involve only one race, with one candidate. In reality, however, voter’s encounter ballots and decision environments that are much more chaotic. Voters are routinely tasked with making decisions about dozens of races and hundreds of candidates simultaneously. How does having more than one candidate running for a local position affect cognitive processing and decision making? How does the additional complication of additional races hinder voter information acquisition and consideration? Features such as type of office may also play a role; it could likely be the case that voters use different types of cognitive strategies to evaluate municipal legislators than they use when choosing mayors, county clerks, school board members, or sheriffs. Finally, as I alluded to in Chapter 1, there are dramatic differences between types of local governments, with different institutional designs, constituencies, and populations. Are the processes used to elect a city councilor in a large urban municipality the same that voters use is a small rural town?
While the wide range of institutional designs commonly found in local governments make them simultaneously hard to conceptualize and empirically examine, they also provide a rich ground for empirical analysis worthy of further exploration. 128
In addition to motivating new research on theorical mechanisms and the effects of institutional compilations on voter information acquisition, these results also encourage a new range of experiments to better understand the effects of electoral environments on voter decision making.
For example, the lack of significant effects for information costs and magnitude are certainly interesting and deserving of additional experimentation using new designs that magnify the relative cost of a failed information search. In the current design, voters make minimal investment for a failed information search; as a result, the only undesirable externality voters experience in the cost treatment is the absence of useful information.
In reality, however, discovering the absence of desired information is a much more costly endeavor. Voters often can invest significant time and cognitive resources in searching for information before subsequently arriving at the realization that the desired details are not available. As a result, future designs should increase the relative cost of information deficiencies. This could likely be achieved in a number of ways, including by forcing voters to wait for the expiration of a timer after encountering missing information (to represent a lost time investment searching for unavailable information), or by using an enclosed network-style information tool in lieu of a traditional information board, which would allow voters to actively search for information even if that information is not actual available.
Similarly, additional experiments that model different types of voting methods could provide substantial insight into the cognitive environment and limitations voters face during the voting process. For example, voters faced with long ballots with dozens of candidates may significantly benefit from delayed voting methods, such as mail-in voting.
These delayed voting methods would likely provide voters more time to become informed 129 about the candidates on their ballot, as well as allowing voters to research information about candidates while actually filling out the ballot paper. Taking advantage of real world institutional variation in the accessibility of delayed voting methods, such as a discontinuity design based on achieving an age-based mail-in voting qualification, could allow scholars to examine the effect of delayed voting on voter information consumption in a real world election. Similarly, synthetic campaign and election experiments could also vary the number of candidates and races present on a voter’s ballot to measure how much information voters access prior to participating in an election.
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Appendices
Chapter 3 Appendix
Experimental Sample Univariate Characteristics
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Chapter 4 Appendix
Experiment 1 Manipulation Check Robustness Test
All analysis presented in the full manuscript utilize the unabridged, unsubseted data (generally, N=651). As a robustness check, I verify the analysis segmenting the data into respondents who successfully completed a post-treatment manipulation check.
After viewing the treatment and indicating which links they would access, respondents completed a manipulation check question . This question asked respondents:
A few minutes ago, you viewed a website for a candidate for political office. What office was that candidate running for? Mayor City Council State Senate Congress The office was not specified
Respondents in the local election treatment were scored as having passed the manipulation check if they indicated the candidate was running in a city council race; respondents in the national election condition were similarly scored if they indicated the respondent was running for a congressional position.
Of the 651 respondents, 482, or ~74%, correctly answered the manipulation check question. However, there are significant differences in correct responses between treatment groups. Those in the national election condition were more likely prove an incorrect response to the manipulation check question. However, there does not appear to be a consistent pattern in the incorrect responses. Of the 111 failed answers in the national treatment, ~38% said the candidate was running for state senate, while 41% indicated that the candidate’s office was not specified on the webpage.
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To identify if these respondents could potentially affect the results, I preform a series of robustness tests using only the respondents who passed the manipulation check question (N=482). Substantively, these results are quite similar to the findings of the original models. Difference in means tests between the groups portray similar findings to those of the full dataset. In addition, for each of the six robustness regressions, the effect of the treatment is statistically significant in the predicted direction, with a similarly (if slightly stronger) magnitude as the results found in the original models.
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Experiment 1 Covariate Balance Table
Experiment Sample Univariate Characteristics Balance Table
Local National Total Treatment Treatment
N Respondents 328 323 651
Male 176 188 364
Gender Female 152 135 287
No HS Diploma 1 1 2
HS Diploma 34 39 73
Some College 97 106 203
Education Bachelor’s Degree 145 135 280
Graduate Degree 51 40 91
18-24 years old 22 27 49
25-34 years old 137 135 321
35-44 79 81 160 Age 45-54 42 29 71
55-64 37 35 72
65+ 11 16 27
Democrat 141 136 277
Independent 103 103 206 Party Republican 84 84 168
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Experiment 2 Covariate Balance Table
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Chapter 5 Appendix
Experiment Balance Table