Voter Competence

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.” (Abraham Lincoln) “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.” (Will Rogers)

Let’s Find Out . . .

McCormick Tribune Freedom Foundation National Survey, 2006

52% could name at least two members of The Simpsons cartoon family (Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie); 22% could name all five

41% could name all three judges on American Idol

28% could name at least two of the First Amendment freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution (speech, press, religion, assembly, petition for redress of grievances); 0.1% could name all five

21% agreed that the First Amendment guaranteed them the right to own and raise pets, while 20% said that it guaranteed them the right to drive a car

And So On and So Forth . . .

77% could identify two of Snow White’s Seven Dwarfs, while 24% were able to name two Supreme Court justices (Zogby, 2006)

74% knew each of the Three Stooges (Larry, Curly, Moe), but only 42%

could name the three branches of government (Zogby, 2006)

presented with a list of categories, only 22% of Californians correctly identified public education as the area where the state spends the most; 45% (including a plurality of those who said they had either “some” or “a lot” of knowledge about how state and local governments raise and spend money) said prisons and corrections – the category with the lowest level of spending (behind education and health/human services; Public Policy Institute of California 2011)

Does any of this really show that the American public (or a large portion of it anyway) is ignorant about politics and government – and, by implication, unable to make reasoned judgments about candidates and policies?

Well . . . The authors of The American Voter (1960) defined

three minimal prerequisites for voters to be able to exert meaningful influence over a given issue:

1. they must be aware of the issue’s existence; 2. they must have a position on the issue; and 3. they must know the positions on the issue of the opposing

candidates in a given election.

More generally . . .

http://www.people-press.org/2013/02/05/what-the-public-knows-in-pictures-maps-graphs-and-symbols/

Are Republicans Really Smarter than Everybody Else?

To the extent that Republicans are at least somewhat better informed than Democrats, the reason might have to do with their higher levels of education:

On the other hand, consider this . . .

. . . and this (misperceptions regarding the war in Iraq). Three survey questions asked in the fall of 2003: 1. Is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found clear

evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization?

2. Since the war with Iraq ended [so declared by President Bush in May ‘03], is it your impression that the U.S. has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?

3. Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the U.S. having gone to war with Iraq, do you think: The majority of people favor the U.S. having gone to war; The majority of people oppose the U.S. having gone to war; or Views are evenly balanced.

correct answers: 1 (no link found), 2 (no WMD found), and 3 (majority opposed)

PIPA/Knowledge Networks, October 2003

A Different Perspective (State Version)

A Different Perspective (Federal Version)

Spending should be decreased a little, a lot, or eliminated entirely in the following areas: Median est. share Actual share of of federal budget federal budget Foreign aid (60%) 10%* 1% Public television/radio (46%) 5% 0.1% Retiree pensions/benefits (54%) 10%* 3.5% Military spending (37%) 30% 19% *one in five say 30% or more http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/01/cnn-poll-americans-flunk-budget-iq-test/

http://www.people-press.org/2013/02/22/as-sequester-deadline-looms-little-support-for-cutting-most-programs/

How Many People Know This Stuff? Do You?

1. How much total debt does the United States have on the books today? A. $8 trillion C. $9.9 trillion

B. $12 trillion D. Over $14 trillion

Answer: D – Assuming an extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for most Americans, this figure is on track to double by 2021.

2. If the United States could eliminate all of this debt today, would it be out

of the woods fiscally speaking? A. Yes B. No

Answer: B – Running the current debt to zero (which would cripple the

economy) could save money on future interest payments (currently projected as 80% of the projected budget for 2021). But it wouldn’t change the budget’s overall trajectory, which is unsustainable, i.e., debt would immediately start accumulating again.

3. How much money does the federal government forgo every year because of all the breaks in the tax code? A. $200 billion C. $1 trillion B. $500 billion D. $2 trillion

Answer: C – These “tax expenditures,” the number of which have quadrupled since 1972, are equal to about one-third of the federal budget.

4. Roughly, what portion of the federal budget goes to mandatory

spending (automatic increases built into current law, cst. discretionary spending that is reviewed by lawmakers every year)? A. 1/3 B. 1/2 C. 2/3

Answer: C – The big-ticket items are Medicare, Medicaid, Social

Security, and interest on the national debt – not foreign aid, federal pensions, PBS, or “waste” (whatever that is).

http://money.cnn.com/quizzes/2010/news/fiscal-debt/ (estimates from Treasury, CBO)

Looking More Closely #1: Measuring Stupidity . . . Oops, I

Mean Knowledge

Recall vs. Recognition Can you tell me who Robert Gates is? (February 2007) U.S. Secretary of Defense 21% Anything else/DK 79% Is Robert Gates the U.S. Secretary of Defense? A senator from Michigan?

The chairman of General Motors? Or is he something else? (March 2007) U.S. Secretary of Defense 37% Other/DK 63% Can you tell me the name of the president of Russia? (February 2007) Vladimir Putin 36% Anything else/DK 64% Can you tell me who is the president of Russia? Is it Boris Yeltsin? Vladimir

Putin? Mikhail Gorbachev? Or is it someone else? (March 2007) Vladimir Putin 60% Other/DK 40% http://www.people-press.org/2007/04/15/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-

news-and-information-revolutions/

Michael D. Martinez and Stephen C. Craig, “Dick Cheney? Didn’t He Shoot Somebody? Measuring Political Knowledge in the 2008 American National Election Study,” SPSA paper (2011).

Respondents were asked what “job or political office” was held by Nancy

Pelosi, Dick Cheney, Gordon Brown, and John Roberts. Answers coded as “clearly correct” were: Speaker of the U.S. House, Vice President, Prime Minister of Great Britain (England, UK), Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

But was it really incorrect to identify Pelosi as a “representative from

California,” Cheney as the “second in command” (or “didn’t he shoot somebody?”), Brown as a “British elected official,” or Roberts as “a federal justice” (or a political reporter on CNN)? These were among the incomplete and “ballpark”answers coded as incorrect in the ANES.

Jeffery J. Mondak, “Developing Valid Knowledge Scales,” AJPS (2001); also see related articles in Political Behavior ’01 and JOP ‘04.

Multiple-choice questions are better than short-answer, in part because

they discourage DK responses – and some people who say DK may actually know the correct answer, or at least have partial knowledge.

Few surveys discourage DK responses (many do the opposite), which has

the effect of identifying some people as being uninformed when they are not. Surveys should encourage guessing and, for those who fail to do so, randomly allocate their answers across substantive response categories.

The reason why some studies show women to be less informed than men

is because they are (on average) less likely to guess; discouraging DKs often reduces the gender knowledge gap by a substantial margin.

Bottom line: Levels of political knowledge in the American electorate are probably higher than our traditional measures indicate.

Looking More Closely #2: Addressing Our Shortcomings

One possible solution to the public’s limited knowledge about politics and current affairs: more education.

Well, maybe not . . . Education levels have risen sharply over the years.

Has the same been true of political knowledge?

http://www.people-press.org/2007/04/15/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news- and-information-revolutions/1/

Benjamin Highton, “Revisiting the Relationship between Educational Attainment and Political Sophistication,” JOP (2009).

Maybe going to college simply proxies other factors that are in place even before people finish high school, e.g., cognitive ability, family background (parental sophistication, SES, values), and interest in politics. In other words, many factors that may influence political knowledge and sophistication are also related to who gets how much education.

Using a 4-wave panel study that covered the period 1965-97, and mea-

suring sophistication in terms of knowledge and ideological understanding (incl. knowing the relative positioning of the parties), Highton found that college educational attainment was indeed a proxy for other causes of sophistication such as cognitive ability (overall GPA, social studies GPA), political engagement (interest, reading about/discussing politics), and parental sophistication (factual knowledge and ideological sophistication as measured in wave 1 of the survey).

So, unless we can change these other factors, simply raising levels of educa- tion per se may not be enough. Still, there’s no doubt that the relationship between education (as well as income) and political knowledge is a strong one:

Shaker, “Local Political Knowledge and Assessments of Citizens’ Competence,” POQ (2012).

Another solution might be for citizens to pay closer attention to the media. There are some caveats here, the most obvious of which is that learning depends on the amount and type of coverage being provided. For example:

Jennifer Jerit, “Understanding the Knowledge Gap: The Role of Experts and

Journalists,” JOP (2009). / Jason Barabas and Jennifer Jerit, “Estimating the Causal Effects of Media Coverage on Policy-Specific Knowledge,” AJPS (2009).

Based on dozens of opinion surveys conducted from 1992-2004, combined

with a content analysis of newspaper and TV news stories: There is a “knowledge gap” based on education/SES, but the size of that gap

becomes larger when coverage involves lots of expert commentary – and smaller when contextual information is provided (stories that discuss the consequences of political developments, provide a comparison with related issues, or supply background information).

Levels of policy-specific knowledge (about gun control, health care, and other issues) increase with (a) higher volume of coverage, though with diminishing returns (i.e., knowledge gains are greatest when coverage changes from none to some); and (b) more prominent coverage (front page of newspapers and first segment of evening news).

What about following campaigns? Can’t people learn about policy and current affairs by paying attention to what happens at election time? You’re probably not going to learn much if the candidates aren’t saying anything substantive (and sometimes they don’t), or if the media aren’t reporting it when they do (that happens a lot as well). Nevertheless, a good bit of research shows that:

People who are exposed to campaign ads, or who read/watch news stories

about the campaign, are more likely to learn the candidates’ issue positions. Unfortunately . . .

Such learning may increase the “knowledge gap” mentioned earlier, i.e., the informationally “rich” tend to get richer relative to those who were less informed to start with. (Academic studies have yielded mixed results on this point.)

One last possible solution to low knowledge levels about politics and current affairs: Go live in another country!

Stacy B. Gordon and Gary M. Segura, “Cross-National Variation in the

Political Sophistication of Individuals: Capability or Choice?” JOP (1997). Capable people in environments where information is available may

rationally choose to remain uninformed if (a) that information is expensive and difficult to accumulate; or (b) use of that information is of limited utility to the person.

Using 1989 surveys from twelve nations in the European Parliament, G-S

measured sophistication as the absolute distance between R's placement of his/her country's parties on a ten-point ideology scale and the mean placement of those parties by remaining respondents from the same country (highly correlated with placement of the parties by researchers).

Results revealed significant cross-national differences in levels of sophistication – differences that were partly attributable to such systemic factors as

number of parties (multiparty → higher sophistication, but this reverses

as the number gets very large, e.g., due to interparty distinctions becom-ing less clear-cut, increased information demands on voters, and the likelihood of coalition governments dampening the party-policy linkage);

competitiveness of the national party system (proportional representation systems → higher sophistication than single-member district systems);

degree of legislative unicameralism (more → higher sophistication); and whether or not there is compulsory voting (yes → higher sophistication,

probably because at least some of those who vote only because they have to will gather the requisite information).

Looking More Closely #3: Our Shortcomings Aren’t Such a

Big Deal After All

Low-Information Rationality Even if most Americans are not very well-informed, is it nevertheless

possible for them to make reasonably good political judgments by using certain short-cuts (“rules of thumb,” “heuristics”) to overcome their informational shortcomings?

This would involve people relying on the limited information they do have

plus such things as partisan stereotypes (all you need is a basic under-standing of the kinds of policies/outcomes that are likely to ensue when one party of the other is in office), elite cues (requiring an awareness of which leaders share your values and interests, e.g., based on shared partisanship or some other trait), or group attachments (requiring an awareness of the values and interests of your social group) to reach pretty much the same decision they would have reached had they been fully informed – something which, by the way, is not a “rational” use of limited resources for most of us.

Does this sort of thing actually happen?

Question: How might people's policy views change if they were fully informed about politics?

Scott L. Althaus, “Information Effects in Collective Preferences,” APSR

(1998). In this study, estimates of "fully informed" opinion were generated by

assigning the preferences of the most highly informed members of a given demographic group to all members of that group, while simultaneously taking into account the influence of other demographic variables.

Based on ANES data from ‘88 and ‘92, Althaus concluded that the average

difference between actual and fully informed opinion on a range of issues was about seven percentage points – not huge, but enough to switch a group's collective opinion from one side of an issue to the other in several instances.

Larry M. Bartels, “Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Presidential Elections,” AJPS (1996):

Found that presidential vote (1972-92) often varied according to one's level of information: (a) fully informed women were more Democratic than less informed women, sometimes by a wide margin; (b) fully informed Protestants were more Republican, though the pattern was less clear-cut and less uniform than with women; (c) fully informed Catholics were usually more Republican; but (d) blacks were more Democratic, and high-income voters more Republican, regardless of information level.

Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, APSR (1997, 2008): Estimated that from 1972-88 about 70 percent of voters, on average,

supported the presidential candidate who best matched their political values and issue preferences. In the second study (covering 1988-2004), the authors found that “correct voting” was positively correlated with a voter’s political knowledge – which serves to remind us that a minimal level of knowledge (e.g., about what the parties stand for, which leaders to trust) is required before one can use heuristics effectively.

Nevertheless: the availability of various cues and information shortcuts apparently helps at least some people to make the "correct“ choices even in the absence of full information (incl. candidates’ issue positions in the case of voting), i.e., those choices are not totally random. But, as Bartels suggests in Wilson Quarterly, there’s a larger question here . . .

Is 70 percent voting “correctly” high enough to say that democracy is

working? Asking this question shifts the focus from individual voters to the electorate as a whole – in other words, if 70 percent make the “correct” choice, does that translate into voters in the aggregate electing the candidate who best represents their collective preferences?

Note that the “voting correctly” argument does not take into account

individual differences in the intensity of preferences, e.g., some people might be ok with a president with whom they disagree on many issues, so long as s/he takes their side on what they consider the most important one(s). Setting that aside, however, there are those who believe that elections usually do turn out the way they “should” because of something called . . .

Miracle of Aggregation

Some scholars maintain that individual “errors” are distributed more-or-less randomly, i.e., they cancel each other out such that those who vote “correctly” ultimately decide who wins. Others, however, insist that this is not how it works in real life. Instead, there often are factors that cause more people on one side than the other to vote inconsistently with their values and issue preferences.

Examples: which candidate “looks” to be more competent which side has enough money left at the end of the campaign to pay for a last-minute TV blitz – something that may have been the

difference in 2000 with Bush-Gore

Moreover, voters’ beliefs and perceptions (e.g., about whether it is possible to reduce the deficit without raising taxes and/or cutting back spending on social programs, whether Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda, whether Barack Obama was born in the United States and is a Muslim) are often skewed by their partisan (or other) biases.

In other words, some people are flat-out misinformed – which

undercuts the arguments of those who defend the electorate by reference to either low-information rationality (uninformed and misinformed aren’t the same thing) or the miracle of aggregation (the level of misinformation may not be equal on both sides).

For example . . .

James H. Kuklinski et al., “Misinformation and the Currency of Demo-cratic Citizenship,” JOP (2000).

This study confirmed that many people are not simply uninformed – they

are misinformed about matters of politics and public policy, i.e., they hold inaccurate beliefs (often with considerable confidence), and these beliefs help to shape their views on policy issues.

Conclusions here were based on an Illinois survey dealing with welfare

policy; the proportion of incorrect answers on factual questions (e.g., percent of families on welfare, proportion of federal budget absorbed by welfare, percent of welfare families that are black) ranged from two-thirds to 90%, w/most wrong answers being in an anti-welfare direction. Perversely, those holding the least accurate (usually anti-welfare) beliefs tended to express the greatest confidence in their accuracy. As expected there was a strong relationship between welfare belief and welfare preference (with causality, in all likelihood, running in both directions).

And how do so many people become misinformed? Studies show that citizens do not react to campaign messages (or to political communications generally, including news reports) “as dispassionate observers, but as biased partisans” (Iyengar, Jackman, and Hahn, MPSA 2008). Accordingly, recall these survey results from earlier:

So what’s going on here?

Jennifer Jerit and Jason Barabas, “Partisan Perceptual Bias and the Information Environment,” JOP (2012).

Both survey and experimental data show that Presented with the same factual information (in media stories), both

Republicans and Democrats exhibit selective learning, i.e., levels of knowledge are higher for stories that cast the person’s party in a positive light, and lower for stories that cast it in a negative light.

This general pattern is amplified for topics that receive greater coverage in the media.

Conclusion: Among partisans, there is a readiness to learn “politically congenial” facts, and a reluctance to learn facts that challenge one’s po-litical predispositions.

Larry M. Bartels, “Beyond the Running Tally: Partisan Bias in Political Perceptions,” Political Behavior (2002).

Shows that partisans often differ not just in their political opinions, but

also in how they perceive the same (presumably objective) political reality, e.g., economic conditions and trends. For example, from the 1988 ANES.

2012 ANES

(T)hinking about the economy in the country as a whole, would you say that over the past year the nation’s economy has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse? (Would you say much better/worse or somewhat better/worse?)

StD WkD LnD Ind LnR WkR StR Much better 8.0% 2.3% 5.3% 1.1% 0.2% 0.9% 1.6% Somewhat better 49.2 35.9 43.3 20.0 10.7 10.9 4.7 About the same 29.7 39.0 33.7 41.3 34.4 43.3 27.8 Somewhat worse 7.6 12.9 8.9 17.3 27.3 24.1 25.2 Much worse 5.5 9.9 8.9 20.4 27.5 20.7 40.8

2012 ANES

Would you say that over the past year, the level of unemployment in the country has gotten better, stayed about the same, or gotten worse? (Would you say much better/worse or somewhat better/worse?)

StD WkD LnD Ind LnR WkR StR Much better 7.6% 2.7% 3.1% 2.0% 0.1% 0.2% 0.5% Somewhat better 46.2 36.9 39.6 15.3 8.5 12.6 6.3 About the same 30.6 35.8 38.2 39.0 36.4 43.0 29.6 Somewhat worse 7.9 12.7 12.2 22.8 31.0 28.3 29.8 Much worse 7.8 11.9 7.0 20.8 24.1 15.9 33.8

One important implication of this finding: Retrospective voting (week #6) is often cited as one way that voters can

use short-cuts to make “reasonable” decisions; that is, even if they don’t know the candidates’ positions on complex issues, they can at least hold incumbent/party accountable by evaluating them on the basis of policy outcomes (performance), especially in terms of either the macroeconomy or one’s own personal finances.

But this can only happen if voters’ perceptions of those outcomes are not

subject to being manipulated by elite/media/campaign rhetoric – or determined by their own partisan biases. Well . . . it doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to: People’s biases often lead them to be more receptive to messages from one side than from the other, and to perceive the information they do receive in a manner that is less than objective.

From The American Voter (pp. 132-133): “Identification with a party raises a perceptual screen through which the

individual tends to see what is favorable to his partisan orientation. The stronger the party bond, the more exaggerated the process of selection and perceptual distortion will be.”

The ability of citizens to compensate for their lack of knowledge by using

informational short-cuts (based on party ID, ideology, or anything else) to make “reasonable” or “correct” political choices, is obviously compromised when those cues lead people to misperceive political reality. It’s one thing for Democrats and Republicans to disagree about the wisdom of flying to the moon. It’s something else again when they disagree about whether the moon even exists.

We will, by the way, return to the issue of partisan bias at various points

throughout the semester.