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.
This research project has explored questions related to how individuals consume political information and the extent to which information provided during electoral campaigns helps or hinders citizens' ability to make informed choices. 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. Using survey experiments, observational data, and simulated campaigns, this project has generated new insights into how manipulating certain aspects of the information environment shapes people’s tendency to support issues and candidates. Specifically, candidates’ positions on issues emerge as important considerations in shaping the extent to which people allow their predispositions to determine their evaluations. The results of this research point to a mixed ability of people to overcome their partisan views. Sharing the same party with a candidate leads people to be more forgiving for policy differences and more enthusiastic about policy similarities. Similarly, rival partisanship leads people to punish candidates more for holding opposing views and to be less willing to view common policy views as grounds for a positive evaluation. In addition, this project has highlighted how campaigns can serve to stimulate greater amounts of information seeking. In this project, people’s evaluations of candidates, as well as their probability of supporting a candidate, could be examined over the course of a campaign. Citizens’ prior political knowledge exerted a strong conditioning effect on the extent to which issue agreement, rather than shared party identification, shaped evaluations of candidates. Improving political knowledge in the electorate, therefore, emerges as one potential strategy that would result in greater use of issue alignment, rather than party cues, in informing people’s political decisions. In sum, this project has helped advance our understanding of how issues and partisanship interact in shaping people’s political decisions. Using a variety of strategies, this project has illustrated the value of concerted efforts to improve the public’s awareness of candidates’ positions on issues, but the limits of issue alignment in shaping political evaluations.
