This evidence is reviewed in Chapter 2 of Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996). Moreover, they note that because surveys' samples are not completely representative, and those who are not represented tend to have the least knowledge, these numbers undoubtedly overestimate the true figures.

Researchers attempting to understand how citizens process political information have advanced motivated reasoning to explain the joint role of affect and cognition. The prominence of affect suggests that all social information processing is affectively charged and prone to biases. This article makes use of a unique data set collected using a dynamic information board experiment to test important effects of motivated reasoning. In particular, affective biases should cause citizens to take longer processing information incongruent with their existing affect and such biases should also direct search for new information about candidates. Somewhat perversely, motivated reasoners may actually increase their support of a positively evaluated candidate upon learning new negatively evaluated information. Findings are reported that support all of these expectations. Additional analysis shows that these affective biases may easily lead to lower quality decision making, leading to a direct challenge to the notion of voters as rational Bayesian updaters.

In order to update candidate evaluations voters must acquire information and determine whether that new information supports or opposes their candidate expectations. Normatively, new negative information about a preferred candidate should result in a downward adjustment of an existing evaluation. However, recent studies show exactly the opposite; voters become more supportive of a preferred candidate in the face of negatively valenced information. Motivated reasoning is advanced as the explanation, arguing that people are psychologically motivated to maintain and support existing evaluations. Yet it seems unlikely that voters do this ad infinitum. To do so would suggest continued motivated reasoning even in the face of extensive disconfirming information. In this study we consider whether motivated reasoning processes can be overcome simply by continuing to encounter information incongruent with expectations. If so, voters must reach a tipping point after which they begin more accurately updating their evaluations. We show experimental evidence that such an affective tipping point does in fact exist. We also show that as this tipping point is reached, anxiety increases, suggesting that the mechanism that generates the tipping point and leads to more accurate updating may be related to the theory of affective intelligence. The existence of a tipping point suggests that voters are not immune to disconfirming information after all, even when initially acting as motivated reasoners.

Lau and Redlawsk (1997)

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.he average voter falls far short of the prescriptions of classic democratic theory in terms of interest, knowledge, and participation in politics. We suggest a more realistic standard: Citizens fulfill their democratic duties if most of the time, they vote "correctly." Relying on an operationalization of correct voting based on fully informed interests, we present experimental data showing that, most of the time, people do indeed manage to vote correctly. We also show that voters' determinations of their correct vote choices can be predicted reasonably well with widely available survey data. We illustrate how this measure can be used to determine the proportion of the electorate voting correctly, which we calculate at about 75% for the five American presidential elections between 1972 and 1988. With a standard for correct vote decisions, political science can turn to exploring the factors that make it more likely that people will vote correctly.he classic texts of democratic theory (such as J. S. T Mill and Rousseau) assume that for a democracy to function properly the average citizen should be interested in, pay attention to, discuss, and actively participate in politics. The attention and discussion provide information about political affairs, which allows citizens to make political decisions (e.g., a vote) based on rationally considered principles reflecting their own self-interest and the common good. All citizens may not be able to live up to these standardssome may be too disinterested, or lack sufficient information or the skills to understand politics, and as a consequence they vote by habit or narrow prejudices, or do not vote at all. But as long as a clear majority lives up to these standards, the collective wisdom of the people will prevail.Five decades of behavioral research in political science have left no doubt, however, that only a tiny minority of the citizens in any democracy actually live up to these ideals. Interest in politics is generally weak, discussion is rare, political knowledge on the average is pitifully low, and few people actively participate in politics beyond voting (e.g., Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes 1960; Converse 1964; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). And what good is even voting if for so many it is based on so little information?The wide divergence between classic normative theory and political reality has led to two widely divergent , who worked as experimenters; Rachelle Brooks and Aletia Morgan, who served as expert judges; Licia DeVivo, who coded much of the open-ended data; and especially Paul Babbitt and Liz Felter, who served in the multiple roles of expert, project manager, experimenter, a...