Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Elections and Citizen Information Processing

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Electoral campaigns are thought to serve two major purposes: 1) to provide citizens opportunities to hold government accountable and 2) to educate citizens about candidates and issues. The first goal, promoting representation, is intimately tied to the second of informing people. But if campaigns fail to educate citizens, or if people are biased consumers of information about candidates, the extent to which citizens can ensure they are being well-represented is weakened. If predispositions and party labels interfere with objective attention to candidates' issue positions, then this poses serious concerns about citizens' competence in a representative democracy. Imagine a citizen trying to decide between two candidates. Often, the choice is simplified by party cues that provide an easy indication that a candidate and a voter hold similar beliefs. In contemporary politics, however, the party cue often fails to serve its informative role. Frequently, candidates hold issue positions that contrast with those of their co-partisans. When party cues and issue preferences diverge, are citizens able to competently attend to candidate positions? Or do partisan identities interfere with people's ability to learn about their choices? The mixed evidence on how party cues and policy information affect citizen competence requires further exploration in the context of a dynamic campaign. The intellectual merit of the project emanates from its attention to the critical question of: to what extent, and how precisely, do party cues limit information seeking and objectivity? If people are unable to attend to candidates' policy positions because of party labels, the expectations of representative democracy require a better understanding of how such biases may be mitigated. Previous experiments have failed to simultaneously 1) leverage the dynamic nature of campaigns to shed light on citizens' willingness to objectively learn policy information, 2) explore the consequences of party and policy manipulations beyond candidate evaluations, and 3) evaluate the mechanisms underlying partisans' biases. This project varies both the extent of issue-based agreement between candidates and voters as well as candidates' party labels. These manipulations, and the ability to track voters' information searches over the course of a dynamic, simulated campaign, will shed light on the conditions under which citizens objectively learn about their choices. As the main component of a larger dissertation on campaign learning, this experimental design speaks to a central aspect of citizen competence - the ability to overcome partisan biases during elections. Normatively, this will provide insight into how campaigns and elections may better encourage voters to look past simple party labels and objectively evaluate candidates. The broader impacts of this work are connected to its extension of our knowledge of why people learn during campaigns, how their predispositions shape their openness to information, and the consequences of new information for their attitudes. Furthermore, this project contributes to multidisciplinary interests in stereotypes, learning, and the normative consequences of using simple cues in evaluating choices. By understanding the conditions under which people will learn cognitively uncomfortable information about candidates, this project helps develop a better picture of why some people are more open to alternative perspectives than others. Furthermore, understanding the conditions under which partisan biases are attenuated can inform strategies that may encourage voters to objectively attend to policy-specific, rather than just partisan-filtered, information. Beyond political science, these findings will be of interest to psychologists who study motivated learning, social scientists interested in representation, and policymakers seeking to better understand the role of campaigns in promoting civic competence and citizen engagement.