A Citizen's Guide to the Political Psychology of Voting

David P. Redlawsk, Michael W. Habegger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317272878
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

In the run-up to a contentious 2020 presidential election, the much-maligned American voter may indeed be wondering, "How did we get here?" A Citizen's Guide to the Political Psychology of Voting offers a way of thinking about how voters make decisions that provides both hope and concern. In many ways, voters may be able to effectively process vast amounts of information in order to decide which candidates to vote for in concert with their ideas, values, and priorities. But human limitations in information processing must give us pause. While we all might think we want to be rational information processors, political psychologists recognize that most of the time we do not have the time or the motivation to do so. The question is, can voters do a "good enough" job even if they fail to account for everything during the campaign? Evidence suggests that they can, but it isn't easy. Here, Redlawsk and Habegger portray a wide variety of voter styles and approaches—from the most motivated and engaged to the farthest removed and disenchanted—in vignettes that connect the long tradition of voter survey research to real life voting challenges. They explore how voters search for political information and make use of it in evaluating candidates and their positions. Ultimately, they find that American voters are reasonably competent in making well-enough informed vote choices efficiently and responsibly. For citizen voters as well as students and scholars, these results should encourage regular turnout for elections now and in the future.

1The Political Psychology of Voting

Perhaps the first sign that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was more uncertain about the outcome than they let on came just a day before the election, when the campaign cancelled its celebratory fireworks over New York City’s Hudson River. No official announcement was made, and in the frenzy of nearly unanimous agreement among pundits and polls that she would be elected the first woman president, a simple NBC News report was little noticed.¹

As we all now know, the November 8, 2016 presidential election resulted in a shock to those same pundits and pollsters, when Donald J. Trump bested Clinton in the Electoral College to win the presidency. He eked out his win by the narrowest of margins in three key states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, as well as taking a number of other toss-up states. Despite winning about 2.9 million more votes than Trump, Clinton was relegated to the spectator seats next to former president Bill Clinton as Trump was sworn in on January 20, 2017.

Every time there is an election, there are winners and there are losers. And there are the voters who get to make that choice. The purpose of this book is less to talk about any specific election—even the election of 2016—than it is to try to understand the voters who make these decisions. Election campaigns are complicated, multi-player games, with campaigns devising and revising strategies, responding to opponents, and reaching out in both obvious and hidden ways to voters. There is much to be said about campaign strategies and about why Donald Trump won his Electoral College victory while Hillary Clinton bested him in the popular vote.

But our intuition is that most of what is written in the coming years will teach us that voting behavior in 2016 was not particularly unique, or even all that odd. While no one can argue that the outcome was expected, or that the information environment did not have some unusual elements, voters—as human beings—haven’t changed just because the 2016 campaign might have been extraordinary. Our plan here, then, is to focus on voters; how they use information to evaluate candidates and make their decisions, how they think and feel about politics, and how they do so within an information environment defined by the campaigns.

Our examination of the political psychology of voter behavior cannot help but touch on campaigns, since they create the bulk of the information environment in which voters operate. So along the way we will use the 2016 presidential election for many of our examples, but for the most part these examples will show how 2016 represented more continuity than change in terms of voting behavior. Our primary goal in this book is to distill and translate the existing literature on how voters decide into a broader understanding of voter behavior in the early twenty-first century not tied to any one election campaign.

Why Voters?

Voting is the essence of democracy. Without the vote, none of us can hold our representatives accountable; in fact, we wouldn’t even have representatives. With the vote, we can readily remove those elected to act for the public when they fail to do so and replace them with others who will, at least in theory. And yet, in many American elections, voters are at least as likely to stay home as they are to show up at the polls. There are many reasons for this, including the simple fact that politics often does not seem central to most citizens’ lives. An exception to this might be an election for a high-profile office such as president, where the overwhelming attention of the media makes the campaign hard to avoid, even for the most dedicated non-voter. But the daily reality for most of our fellow Americans is one of putting food on the table, hoping the car starts to get to the job, and making sure the kids are all right. Politics—and voting—simply do not seem nearly as important as getting through the day-to-day challenges of living.

Political scientists have routinely rued this reality, expecting the average citizen to be as engaged in the political process as they themselves are. From the earliest voting studies, researchers have told us that citizens pay little attention to politics and are uninformed about their choices, and thus are at risk of being unable to hold their representatives to account even if they wanted to. And this is just research about people who actually do vote. Non-voters are thought to be all this and more: simply disconnected from the complexities of politics and voting, uninterested and completely uninformed.

For many citizens, voting may be the only overt act that supports the continuation of a democratic system. Scholars have systematically studied voting from almost the beginning of the discipline of political science, with an early focus on when and why people turn out to vote. The earliest political science experiment, conducted in 1927, was designed to understand how to increase turnout.² With the rise of survey research and other techniques for directly observing voters, research rapidly expanded beyond the questions of who votes to encompass the processes that underpin the vote choice. Why do people choose the candidates they do? Early survey-based studies, like The American Voter in 1960, suggested that even citizens who vote are “ideologically innocent,” with most unable to even identify which political party is “left” and which is “right.” As a result, vote choices are not well grounded in the issues of the day. Instead, most voters simply consider the “nature of the times” as they make their decision or follow the preferences of others in their social groups. In short, study after study has found that voters are not particularly competent in the art of democracy.

In a representative democracy like the United States, the purpose of voting is to hold representatives accountable. For that to happen, voters must know who the candidates are, know where those candidates stand on the issues, and have and know their own preferences on the same issues. They must make their vote decisions grounded in a correspondence between their own preferences and those of the candidates. This is a pretty high bar, especially when we add in the expectation that voters must be well informed on the full range of issues at stake in any given election. It is a bar that few, if any, voters can actually reach. The political world is simply too complex, with too many moving parts, for anyone to be fully informed.

A different perspective on voter capacity has been advanced by many political psychologists. A major focus of this research suggests that voters can do a reasonable job of electoral decision-making without being fully informed. This view sees voters in general as competent enough to make accurate assessments of candidates even if they do not know everything about everything (or even a lot). Rather than needing to be demonic processors, able to absorb and process an almost infinite amount of information, voters make use of information processing strategies that may not be always optimal but are often “good enough.” Voters are motivated by both a desire to do a good job and to get the job done as quickly as possible with as little cognitive (thinking) effort as needed.³ While these two motivations generally conflict, there are a number of ways in which citizens can lessen the conflict and do a reasonable job of finding the candidate who best meets their interests most of the time. Throughout this book, we hope to show how that gets done, but also make clear where it can fail.

The Lau and Redlawsk Framework

Much of the grounding for this book comes from original research carried out by David Redlawsk and Richard Lau, highlighted in their 2006 book, How Voters Decide. That book proposes an information processing framework of voting, arguing that voter decision-making is best understood as a process, rather than a decision made at a single point in time. The process of voter decision-making is influenced by a number of factors, as summarized in the framework reproduced here in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1Process-oriented Framework for Studying Voter Decision-making

Note: Adapted from Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk, How Voters Decide (2006, New York, Cambridge University Press), 22. Used with permission.

The framework begins with the voter, who is a product of various Background Characteristics, such as age, race, gender, partisanship, ideology, and so on, but also includes factors such as personality traits, predispositions toward political figures and policies, and more. For many commentators not interested in the process of voter decision-making, assessments of how voters choose generally stop here. Analysts tell us, for example, that certain racial groups vote in specific ways, and that partisanship drives most American general elections. But such analyses do not really get at the questions of why voters do what they do, except in rather superficial ways.

Our framework goes beyond this simple voter-focused approach. It recognizes that a number of factors outside of the voter’s control influence not just what the voter decides, but how she makes her decision. By extension, these factors then influence not just the evaluations and choice the voter makes, but her ability to do a “good job.” We’ll describe this framework in more detail in the next chapter. For now, we want to note that it provides an important starting point for modern political psychology conceptions of voter decision-making. It sees voters as critical, but also tells us that the environment in which they operate matters as well—maybe even just as much.

The Decision Task label summarizes the intersection of the Campaign Factors—such as the number of candidates on the ballot, the distinctiveness of those candidates, whether an election is partisan or not, the amount of information available to voters, and so on—and voter background characteristics. These combine to determine how hard or easy the decision task is for any given voter (which we will call the political environment in Chapter 3), and thus help determine what kind of Information Processing strategy the voter will use to evaluate the candidates and make a choice. Finally, the framework includes assessments of how good a job voters do, labeled as Vote Choice & Quality.

As we work our way through the political psychology of voting, we will follow this framework, but we will also go beyond it. In the late 1980s and 1990s, most political psychologists interested in voting were thinking about thinking, working in the cognitive tradition of information processing. This approach was influenced by ideas in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and computer science. It used the computer, with its input, processing, and output subsystems, as a general model of human information processing. The processing subsystem was a black box to be examined using observation and experiments that would allow us to learn how voters made their choices. An early example of this approach was Stanley Kelley and Thad Mirer’s “Simple Act of Voting” model from 1974, which argued that voters make their decisions only when it comes time to vote. Voters do this by recalling from memory whatever candidate information they can bring to mind, evaluating it, and then deciding which candidate has the more positive evaluation. Voters weigh the information they learn about their choices and pick the best one. This is a cognitive process, relying on memory stores (much like computer memory) and bringing information into working memory (like a computer’s central processing unit) to process.

The strength of the cognitive approach was that it recognized that voting is a process. The key weakness might be obvious even to the non-psychologist. While thinking may well be engaged during a political campaign, feeling may be engaged even more. The intensity of the 2016 presidential campaign certainly provides evidence of that. Political psychologists learned that they needed to consider the role emotion plays in voter decision-making, just as much as they needed to consider cognition. More recent approaches to the political psychology of voting have considered models that combine both cognition and emotion in reciprocal processes, where each may influence the other. While in many respects this research is relatively new, building on exciting work in the neuroscience of emotions, it stems from very old ideas.

How old? One scholar of emotions identifies the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle as perhaps the first to see how emotions and thinking might be intertwined: “Aristotle suggested that people are made angry by the thought that they had been unfairly slighted.”⁴ That is, people see that they are being slighted and, in seeing this (and thus cognitively processing it), they become angry. This idea, that emotions are generated by cognitive appraisals of situations, is not the only theory of emotions debated in psychology, but, for our purposes, it is quite useful. It suggests that, in politics, for example, emotions can be aroused by what candidates say about their policies, about themselves, and about their opponents. Importantly, these emotions—such as enthusiasm or anxiety—then have consequences for how new information about the candidates and campaign is processed. We are not the cool, emotionless, comprehensive calculators that some versions of rationality require. But neither are emotions in politics disconnected from what we actually perceive to be happening. It is possible to feel an emotional response—let’s say fear, for example—before we actually perceive the snake lying just in front of us on the hiking trail. In this way, emotions might be separate from cognition, causing us to react before we even know why. But in the context of voting, emotions and cognitions appear likely to be intertwined. There are important debates on this point, and different ways of seeing emotion in politics. But few would d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Political Psychology of Voting
• 2 Voter Decision-Making as a Process
• 3 The Voter’s Information Environment
• 4 Good Decisions are Rational Decisions. Or are they?
• 5 The Constrained Rational Voter
• 6 Our Identities Matter
• 7 The Intuitive Voter
• 8 Emotions and Voting
• 9 So, What Do Voters Do?
• Index