Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0003055400092121

Shortcuts versus encyclopedias: information and voting behavior in california insurance reform elections

Accumulated research findings show that women tend to express higher levels of concern toward technology and the environment than do men, but that the tendency is not universal. The findings are particularly clear-cut for local facilities and/or nuclear and other technologies that are often seen as posing nisks of contamination; findings appear to be more mixed for broader patterns of environmental concern. Although the differing patterns have been reported with enough consistency to be considered relatively robust, less progress has been made to date in explaining the underlying dynamics. Five main hypotheses can be identified. One hypothesis, the expectation that increased knowledge will lead to decreased concern, has received so little support, despite repeated examination, that it can be discarded. Another, that women tend to express greater concern than do men about the health and safety implications of any given level of technological risk, has received consistent support. The remaining 3 hypotheses...

Gender and Environmental Risk Concerns A Review and Analysis of Available Research

Rapid change in public policy outcomes often occurs, but most theories of pluralism emphasize only incrementalism. Yet from a historical view, it can easily be seen that many policies go through lo...

/pdf/agenda-dynamics-and-policy-subsystems-12198vqyck.pdf

Agenda Dynamics and Policy Subsystems

Institutions and social actors involved in managing risk have to cope with the problem of legitimating their decisions and policies in a political arena, in which the major stakeholders are still defining their social role and in which the public is observing a confusing mix of controversial and often contradictory information. Furthermore, in spite of the newness of the new risk paradigm in society, two opposing camps have evolved: one supporting and promoting large technologies and further economic growth, and the other opposing large-scale technologies, supporting conservation efforts, and favoring a zero or low growth economy. In the cultural theory of risk these two groups have been labelled as center and periphery (Douglas and Wildavski 1982) or entrepreneurian and sectarian (Rayner and Cantor 1987). The two camps have formed their own institutions and support groups, and try to convince the general public that their perspective on risk is the one to pursue. The rigidity of their positions has polarized the public debate.

/pdf/credibility-and-trust-in-risk-communication-2t3ymjog0a.pdf

Credibility and trust in risk communication

Does a typical House member need to worry about the electoral ramifications of his roll-call decisions? We investigate the relationship between incumbents’ electoral performance and roll-call support for their party—controlling for district ideology, challenger quality, and campaign spending, among other factors—through a series of tests of the 1956–1996 elections. The tests produce
three key findings indicating that members are indeed accountable for their legislative voting. First, in
each election, an incumbent receives a lower vote share the more he supports his party. Second, this effect is comparable in size to that of other widely recognized electoral determinants. Third, a member’s probability of retaining office decreases as he offers increased support for his party, and this relationship holds for not only marginal, but also safe members.

/pdf/out-of-step-out-of-office-electoral-accountability-and-house-2nh8svtgv6.pdf

Out of Step, Out of Office: Electoral Accountability and House Members' Voting

The rise of a new set of complex and highly consequential issues has generated a heated debate about the place of the citizen in the decision-making process. This article examines how citizens choose one policy option over another on nuclear energy and whether informed citizens use a decision calculus fundamentally different from that of the uninformed. Knowledgeable citizens, we find, rely heavily on ideology, which also colors their cost-benefit calculations, while the unknowledgeable draw on their generalized outlooks toward technology and the cues provided by groups involved in the nuclear energy controversy.

Citizen Knowledge and Choices on the Complex Issue of Nuclear Energy

We live in a time when institutions of all kinds are instruments of great power and are often the objects of deep suspicion. Not surprisingly, scholars and political commentators have noted that the public increasingly distrusts many of those organizations. Indeed, for some of them, the crisis of trust is especially acute, coloring and constraining virtually all their actions and choices. How might they respond not only to maintain but also to enhance the level of trust they are accorded? The Problem of Trust In proposing answers to that question, we draw heavily from a study commissioned by former Secretary of Energy James D. Watkins (SEAB, 1993). Recognizing that the Department of Energy (DOE) was one of the institutions facing a serious deficit of trust, Watkins established a task force to explore how the DOE might take steps to increase public trust and confidence in the agency's programs for managing commercially generated radioactive waste as well as the huge volume of radioactive and toxic wastes associated with the manufacture of nuclear weapons. (See gray box on page 343 for a description of those programs.) Watkins' successor, Hazel R. O'Leary, has continued to place building trust among her highest priorities (DOE, 1994). In many respects, Watkins and O'Leary had to address issues common to most organizations. For example, how can trust be sustained when strong ideological and policy differences about the organization's central direction, mission, and goals divide key stakeholder groups from each other as well as from the agency itself? In other respects, however, maintaining (and recovering) trust in its radioactive waste management activities presents special and unavoidable challenges for the DOE.(1) 1. There is increasing hostility to current or future operations based on learning about past agency practices.(2) 2. Operations are beneficial but hazardous in their design, that is, the work is intrinsically dangerous. 3. Hazards are likely to extend well after benefits have been gained. 4. Overall success or failure of the operations may not be well understood for perhaps three or four work generations. 5. There is reasonably rapid change in the technical aspects of the work, either in the core technologies or in information about the environment where they are deployed. Of course, organizations other than the DOE confront many, if not all, of these same challenges. This article should, therefore, be of particular interest to those who manage or must deal with such agencies or firms. Much of the work on trust carried out so far focuses on the relations between individuals in general social settings, between employees and managers in corporate life, between parties in economic exchanges, or between citizens and broad institutions of governance.(3) Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the relationship of trust between citizens and stakeholders, on the one hand, and administrative agencies or firms, on the other. A serious analytical shortfall exists in our understanding of the bases for institutional trustworthiness and about the conditions that would reduce serious deficits in public trust and confidence - a situation akin to betrayal in individual relations. Because of this analytic shortfall, terms such as trust and confidence, which are understood intuitively, elude crisp and precise definition. Thus they can be used with wonderful rhetorical ambiguity.(4) The following notions provide the initial conceptual touchstone for our discussion here (SEAB, 1993; see also La Porte, 1994, Keller and La Porte, 1994): * Trust is the belief that those with whom you interact will take your interests into account, even in situations where you are not in a position to recognize, evaluate, and/or thwart a potentially negative course of action by "those trusted." * Confidence exists when the party trusted is able to empathize with (know of) your interests, is competent to act on that knowledge, and will go to considerable lengths to keep its word. …

https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/people/u3825/LaPorte%20Hazards%20and%20InstTrust.pdf

Hazards and Institutional Trustworthiness: Facing a Deficit of Trust

What are we to make of the recent explosion of academic research focusing 
on trust relationships? At the very least, these studies signal that trust plays a 
number of central roles in the civic culture. For example, trust seems to 
influence how individuals perceive technological risks (Flynn et al 1992); it 
appears to catalyse regional economic development (Putnam 1993); it likely 
provides a ‘lubricant’ for interactions within organizations (Meyerson et al. 
1996); and it probably is linked to the level of political legitimacy enjoyed by 
democratic regimes (Inglehart 1990). But, at the same time, the notion of trust 
comes in so many flavours, packages, and subspecies that it seems to have 
been swallowed up in a conceptual quagmire. Scholars have presented us with 
‘calculus-based trust’, ‘knowledge-based trust’, and ‘identification-based trust’ 
(Lewicki and Bunker 1996). They have argued about ‘characteristic-based 
trust’, ‘process-based trust’, and ‘institutional-based trust’ (Zucker 1986).

Institutional Trust and Confidence: A Journey into a Conceptual Quagmire

Our analysis of the interviews with a sample of the California public about a range of their attitudes toward technology shows that a modification of our understanding of the collective state of mind on this subject is in order. The current assessment of the public as largely, and somewhat vacantly, enamored with science and technology does not hold. Nor does a picture of a public generally hostile and alienated by technology. Neither panglossian optimism nor prophecies of doom can be supported by these interviews. Rather a more mixed picture emerges. Out of that picture, a potential public can be isolated, whose mood it behooves science policy-makers to watch. This group tends to associate a number of related conditions with technological development; moreover, it is likely to make assessments on those relationships so perceived. To the degree this group has "antitechnological" feelings, these feelings are clearly linked to the group9s awareness that the social consequences of technology can produce conditions which threaten important values. The particular distribution of age and political identification suggests that those who are young and who identify themselves as "liberal" form the core of potential opposition to technological development and that such opposition is at least in part a function of different value preferences. The associations between political identification and attitudes about technology, distrust of decision-making, and concern for environmental impacts all make this point. In short, "technological dissent" cannot be written off as antiintellectual and without foundation. It is, in fact, preeminently sensible. What the alignments visible within the potential public portend for the future is not clear, although they do not allow us to accept an inference drawn from past studies—that because the young retain confidence in scientists and engineers all is well for the general climate of science and technology. We can only speculate whether, as these younger people grow older, they will carry their uneasiness about technology with them. Were they to do so, and were this group to be joined by still younger people who also hold these wary attitudes, the context of scientific and technological work could become much more fraught with political controversy. Another point emerging from our interpretation is how very crucial to continued free scientific inquiry is the distinction between scientific work and technological activities apparently now made by a sizable portion of the public. Should this distinction become lost, perhaps through continual merging of science9s role with technology9s by the popular press, attitudes now mainly associated with technology could spill over to scientific research as well. Yet our data also provide evidence of the successes of the scientific and technological communities. They have become such a critical part of life that people are seriously concerned with their future development. The opportunity is present for both communities to find ways of responding to the situation so that thoughtful action can be taken to implement technology for the benefit of the commonweal.

/pdf/technology-observed-attitudes-of-a-wary-public-ahbuk32ex4.pdf

Daniel Metlay

Papers

Citizen Knowledge and Choices on the Complex Issue of Nuclear Energy

Hazards and Institutional Trustworthiness: Facing a Deficit of Trust

Institutional Trust and Confidence: A Journey into a Conceptual Quagmire

Technology Observed: Attitudes of a Wary Public.

Decision Strategies for Addressing Complex " Messy " Problems