Who’s Voted In When the People Tune Out? Information Effects in Congressional Elections

1 It is something of an understatement to say that most Americans pay little attention to the world of politics. Survey after survey has shown that Americans are often at a loss to relate basic facts about the players, issues, and rules of the game that structure American political life (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). For instance, when asked whether the Republican or Democratic party was generally more conservative—surely an essential piece of information for connecting values with votes—only 57% of respondents in the 1992 National Election Study could correctly choose the Republican party. As the laws of probability tell us that half should have arrived at the correct answer by chance, the degree of public ignorance reflected in this finding is sobering indeed. Since democracy is, at least in theory, the form of government best suited for realizing and responding to the " will of the people, " the fact that most people know (and care) very little about politics raises the possibility that democratic institutions function less well in practice than in premise. This chapter examines the impact of political ignorance on the basic units of democratic input: individual votes cast in free elections. Do ill-informed people, regardless of their personal political views, tend as a group to favor certain kinds of candidates? If so, we might rightly question not only the ability of citizens to accurately communicate their needs, wants, and values 2 through the ballot box, but also the quality of representation provided by this most basic of democratic institutions. The discovery by survey researchers in the 1940's and 1950's of widespread public ignorance about political affairs led several early and influential studies to suggest that the public's views on political matters were often shallow and misguided taken as axiomatic in subsequent research on public opinion and voting behavior, a number of studies in the past decade have suggested that the mass public's inattention to politics may have less bearing on the quality of its political judgments than previously thought. These studies emphasize that while most individuals tend to be ill informed about the political world, the availability of heuristic shortcuts (e. compensate for this lack of knowledge in measures of collective opinion such as election results or opinion surveys. Yet recent work on information effects in collective preferences has demonstrated that the low levels and uneven social distribution of political knowledge in the mass public …