Measuring Voter Decision Strategies in Political Behavior and Public Opinion Research

Although political science has advanced the study of voter decision-making, the discipline still understands very little about how citizens go about reaching those decisions. In this article, we introduce a five-factor self-report scale of political decision-making (PolDec-5) administered to six different samples with more than 6,500 respondents over the past four years. Analyses illustrate that our five subscales—Rational Choice, Confirmatory, Fast and Frugal, Heuristic-Based, and Going with Your Gut—have high internal consistency, relatively high discriminant validity (as they are largely distinct from existing measures of decision-making style), and significantly high predictive validity, as established by process tracing studies where actual decision strategies of voters can be observed directly. Finally, we discuss how these new measures can help predict important political outcomes

Effect of Media Environment Diversity and Advertising Tone on Information Search, Selective Exposure, and Affective Polarization

This paper examines the effects of our modern media environment on affective polarization. We conducted an experiment during the last month of the 2012 presidential election varying both the choice of media sources available about the major presidential candidates, and the tone of political advertisements presented to subjects. We posit that voters in a high-choice, ideologically-diverse media environment will exhibit greater affective polarization than those in a “mainstream” ideologically neutral environment. We also hypothesize that subjects who are exposed to negative rather than positive political advertisements will show increased affective polarization. We provide causal evidence that the combination of a high-choice ideologically diverse media environment and exposure to negative political ads, significantly increases affective polarization. We also find that both overall information search and selective exposure to information are influenced by our experimental manipulations, with the greatest amount of search, and the most biased search, conducted by Romney supporters in the Negative Ads, Diverse Media condition

Experiments on the Reaction of Citizens to New Voting Rules: A Survey

International audienceThis paper is a survey of what we learned from experiments about how innovations in the field of voting are received. Different experimental methods have been used: in the laboratory, on line and in situ. Preferences for voting rules are driven by self-interest, by a quest for simplicity and are also correlated with political attitudes. For most rules, voters show no cognitive barriers to their use, but for more complex rules, serious misunderstanding can appear