How Elitism Undermines the Study of Voter Competence

A form of elitism undermines much writing on voter competence. The elitist move occurs when an author uses a self-serving worldview as the basis for evaluating voters. Such elitism is apparent in widely cited measures of “political knowledge” and in common claims about what voters should know. The elitist move typically limits the credibility and practical relevance of the analysis by leading writers to draw unreliable conclusions about voter competence. I propose a more constructive way of thinking about what voters know. Its chief virtue is its consistency with basic facts about the relationship between information and choice.information; search; competence; political knowledge; public policy

Necessary Conditions for Improving Civic Competence: A Scientific Perspective

Many attempts to increase civic competence are based on premises about communication and belief change that are directly contradicted by important insights from microeconomic theory and social psychology. At least two economic literatures are relevant to my effort to improve matters. One is the literature on strategic communication, which includes Spence (1974), Crawford and Sobel (1982), Banks (1991), and Lupia and McCubbins (1998). The other is the literature on mechanism design, which includes Green and Laffont (1977), Myerson (1983) and Palfrey (1992). While both literatures have the potential to convey important insights, many scholars and practitioners do not yet see a need for such insights. This paper lays such a foundation. It explains how greater attention to basic scientific principles can help people who want to increase civic competence use the generosity of donors and the hard work of well-intentioned citizens more effectively. The paper continues as follows. First, I discuss the topic of competence more precisely. Then, I introduce the necessary conditions for increasing civic competence described above. Next, I describe implications and applications of these conditions – focusing in this paper on the growing contention that deliberation is an effective way to increase civic competence. Applying the necessary conditions to this topic reveals a need to revise and clarify common expectations about what deliberation can accomplish. A brief concluding section follows.incomplete information, strategic communication, learning, behavioral economics,

What Citizens Know Depends on How You Ask Them: Political Knowledge and Political Learning Skills

Surveys provide widely-cited measures of political knowledge. Do unusual aspects of survey interviews reduce their relevance? To address this question, we embedded a set of experiments in a representative survey of over 1200 Americans. A control group answered political knowledge questions in a typical survey context. Respondents in treatment groups received the same questions in different contexts. One group received a monetary incentive for answering questions correctly. Others were given more time to answer the questions. The treatments increase the number of correct answers by 11-24 percent. Our findings imply that conventional knowledge measures confound respondents’ recall of political information and their motivation to engage the survey question. The measures also provide unreliable assessments of respondents’ abilities to access information that they have stored in places other than their immediately available memories. As a result, existing knowledge measures likely underestimate peoples’ capacities for informed decision making.political knowledge; economic knowledge; experimental economics; incentives; survey

Lost in Translation: Social Choice Theory is Misapplied Against Legislative Intent

Several prominent scholars use results from social choice theory to conclude that legislative intent is meaningless. We disagree. We support our argument by showing that the conclusions in question are based on misapplications of the theory. Some of the conclusions in question are based on Arrow\u27s famous General Possibility Theorem. We identify a substantial chasm between what Arrow proves and what others claim in his name. Other conclusions come from a failure to realize that applying social choice theory to questions of legislative intent entails accepting assumptions such as legislators are omniscient and legislators have infinite resources for changing law and policy. We demonstrate that adding more realistic assumptions to models of social choice theory yields very different theoretical results-including ones that allow for meaningful inferences about legislative intent. In all of the cases we describe, important aspects of social choice theory were lost in the translation from abstract formalisms to real political and legal domains. When properly understood, social choice theory is insufficient to negate legislative intent

What Citizens Know Depends on How You Ask Them: Experiments on Time, Money and Political Knowledge

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do unusual aspects of survey interviews affect these measures? An experiment on a nationally representative sample of over 1200 Americans provides an answer. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four groups. A control group answers questions in a typical survey context. Respondents in three treatment groups are given a longer window of time in which to answer questions, a small monetary incentive for answering questions correctly, or both. These variations increase performance significantly for almost every knowledge question we asked. Overall, average knowledge scores in the treatment groups are 11-24 percent higher than in the control group. The treatments also cause significant reductions in the magnitude of respondents’ errors on open-ended questions. The findings imply that new elicitation strategies can improve our understanding of what citizens know about politics and other socially relevant phenomena.information economics, political information, experimental economics, incentives

Should Political Scientists Use the Self-Confirming Equilibrium Concept? Explaining the Choices of Cognitively Limited Actors

Many claims about political behavior are based on implicit assumptions about human reasoning. One such assumption, that political actors think in complex and similar ways when assessing strategies, is nested within widely used game theoretic equilibrium concepts. Empirical research casts doubt on the validity of these assumptions in important cases. For example, the finding that some citizens expend limited cognitive energy to social concerns runs counter to the assumption that citizens (e.g., jurors) base all decisions on complex thoughts. Similarly, evidence that some political actors (e.g., Democrats and Republicans) think about political cause-and-effect quite differently runs against the assumption that all players reason about politics in similar ways. The self-confirming equilibrium (SCE) concept provides a means for evaluating the robustness of theoretical conclusions to the introduction of a broad range of psychological assumptions. Through arguments and examples, we explain opportunities and challenges inherent in using the SCE concept. We find that the concept provides an improved foundation for more serious and constructive interactions between formal theoretic and psychology-oriented literatures.political science; equilibrium concepts; cognition; jury decision making; self-confirming equilibrium; Nash equilibrium; need for cognition; conjecture; belief

An Alternative Statistical Measure for Racially Polarized Voting

Measurements of the existence and extent of racially polarized voting are often at the forefront of the evidence presented in vote dilution litigation. Previous models used in the measurement of racially polarized voting have been inadequate for a broad range of cases. The source of this inadequacy is that these models were not based upon assumptions about individual behavior. A new model, which is based on reasonable assumptions about individual behavior and can be approximated by a varying parameters model, is derived. By contrasting the new model with the other models, it is shown that both the correlation coefficient and linear regression can lead to inaccurate, misleading or incorrect conclusions about the state of racial polarization in the electorate. After providing a straightforward statistical test for identifying misspecification and showing how to obtain estimates for this model by the method of maximum likelihood, the model is compared with an individual level data set of an election where racially polarized voting occurred (1988 California presidential primacy). A new measure for the estimation of racially polarized voting is then proposed

What Statutes Mean: Interpretive Lessons from Positive Theories of Communication and Legislation

How should judges interpret statutes? For some scholars and judges, interpreting statutes requires little more than a close examination of statutory language, with perhaps a dictionary and a few interpretive canons nearby. For others, statutory interpretation must be based upon an assessment of a statute\u27s underlying purpose, an evaluation of society\u27s current norms and values, or a normative objective, such as the law\u27s integrity. With such differences squarely framed in the literature, it is reasonable to ask whether anything of value can be added. We contend that there is

When Do Campaigns Matter? Informed Votes, the Heteroscedastic Logit and the Responsiveness of Electoral Outcomes

Previous research suggests that voters in mass elections tend to be badly informed. If these voters do not know enough about the relationship between the policy consequences of electoral outcomes and their own interests, then electoral outcomes may not provide meaningful expressions of voter interests. Can campaign activity affect the relationship between voter interests and electoral outcomes? To answer this question, we use survey data from 35 comparable elections and a new empirical methodology (Dubin and Zeng's [1991] heteroscedastic logit). The new methodology allows us to estimate the joint effect of voter information and interests on voting behavior in a way that is both theoretically justifiable and better at explaining the available data than traditional methods. We find that campaign activity increases the likelihood that electoral outcomes are responsive to (perhaps, otherwise badly informed) voter interests, when campaigners are able to exert costly and observable effort, are able to make credible statements and have the opportunity to engage in a vigorous and competitive campaign

Public Ignorance and Estate Tax Repeal: The Effect of Partisan Differences and Survey Incentives

We re-examine whether the broad support for repeal of the estate tax is a result of citizen ignorance. We find that increasing information about the estate tax or politics in general has very different effects on Republicans and Democrats. While high and low-information Republicans support estate tax repeal, Democratic support is higher among those who know less. However, most highly-informed people in both parties support repeal. We also show that standard surveys overestimate the extent of misinformation about the estate tax. Therefore, “ignorance” is not a compelling explanation of why so many people support estate tax repeal.estate tax; voter competence; survey research; experimental economics; public policy