Journal ArticleDOI
Shortcuts versus encyclopedias: information and voting behavior in california insurance reform elections
TLDR
This article found that voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed, and that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters.Abstract:
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.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity
TL;DR: This chapter discusses Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers, a method for assessing Collinearity, and its applications in medicine and science.
Journal ArticleDOI
When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions
Brendan Nyhan,Jason Reifler +1 more
TL;DR: The authors conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from a politician, or misleading claim and a correction, and found that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group.
Journal ArticleDOI
Valuing the Environment through Contingent Valuation
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that in the presence of externalities, market transactions do not fully capture preferences and that collective choice is the more relevant paradigm to the public good nature of pollution.
Journal ArticleDOI
Incentive and informational properties of preference questions
TL;DR: The authors applied the standard neoclassical economic framework to generate predictions about how rational agents would answer such survey questions, which in turn implies how such survey data should be interpreted, and compared different survey formats with respect to the information that the question itself reveals to the respondent, the strategic incentives the respondent faces in answering the question, and the information revealed by the respondent's answer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Advantages and Disadvantages of Cognitive Heuristics in Political Decision Making
Richard R. Lau,David P. Redlawsk +1 more
TL;DR: The authors found that cognitive heuristics are at times employed by almost all voters and that they are particularly likely to be used when the choice situation facing voters is complex, and they were also found to be useful for complex decisions.
References
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Book
An Economic Theory of Democracy
TL;DR: Downs presents a rational calculus of voting that has inspired much of the later work on voting and turnout as discussed by the authors, particularly significant was his conclusion that a rational voter should almost never bother to vote.
Journal ArticleDOI
Job Market Signaling
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a model in which signaling is implicitly defined and explains its usefulness, in which the employer is not sure of the productive capabilities of an individual at the time he/she hires him.
Book
Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a method for detecting and assessing Collinearity of observations and outliers in the context of extensions to the Wikipedia corpus, based on the concept of Influential Observations.
Journal ArticleDOI
The American Voter
Journal ArticleDOI
Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity
TL;DR: This chapter discusses Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers, a method for assessing Collinearity, and its applications in medicine and science.