An Exploration of Correct Voting in Recent U.S. Presidential Elections

Lau and Redlawsk (1997) proposed that the quality of voter decision making can be evaluated by measuring what they called correct voting—the extent to which people vote in accordance with their own values and priorities—but in so doing provided little guidance about what actually determines whether voters can make such high-quality decisions. This article develops a framework for analyzing the vote decision that views the quality of decision making as a joint function of individual characteristics and various higher-level campaign factors. We hypothesize that differences in cognitive capacity, political motivation, the availability of political heuristics, and macrolevel factors that affect the difficulty of the choice confronting citizens, including the nature of the political information environment, should all affect the probability of a correct vote. We find significant support for seven proposed hypotheses across three levels of analysis, which places responsibility for incorrect votes on both the individual and our electoral system. Democracy works best when citizens are interestedin politics, able to place current events in properhistorical context, attentive to the actions of rep-resentatives in government, aware of institutional rules and requirements so that responsibility for government actions can be properly attributed, and engaged in the governing process to the extent they vote for the candi-dates they believe best represent their interests. This is