Are You Picking Up What I Am Laying Down? Ideology in Low-Information Elections

Abstract

In November 2017, New Orleans elected the first woman, and first Black woman, mayor in the city’s history. Voters were unable to rely on gender, race, or partisanship to differentiate between the candidates in the race. How, then, do voters make decisions absent traditional heuristics? Using an analysis of campaign materials and two-wave panel survey, we show that the candidates sent ideological signals with endorsements and issue foci and that voters responded by placing the candidates ideologically. Those voters who could not differentiate between the candidates’ ideologies were less likely to turn out to vote and took longer to decide in the elections. Using a new measure of relative ideological distance adopted for multicandidate races, we show that the distance between each voter and the nearest candidates correlated with vote choice. Our results add to our knowledge of voting behavior and the use of ideology in local elections.

The Structure of Municipal Voting in Vancouver

“…In the more specific context of municipal electoral politics, a large body of research has found that standard ideological and partisan positions are clearly relevant to municipal vote choice in Canada and the United States (Holman and Lay 2021;Lucas 2020a;Lucas and McGregor 2020;Sances 2018), but other factors, such as race (Hajnal and Trounstine 2014;Kaufmann 2004) and local policy issues (Oliver and Ha 2007) also affect municipal voting. Two excellent studies of mayoral voting in Vancouver, covering the 2002 and 2018 elections, have argued that ideology and policy issue attitudes were crucial predictors of mayoral vote choice (Cutler and Matthews 2005b;Rooij, Matthews, and Pickup 2020), though it is not yet clear if these findings apply to non-mayoral vote choice as well.…”

Policy Ideology and Local Ideological Representation in Canada

“…While most scholars continue to acknowledge that municipal jurisdictional limits and inter-municipal competition do constrain municipal attempts at redistributive policy making, a large body of evidence suggests not only that ideology plays an important role in municipal vote choice (Holman and Lay, 2021; Sances, 2018) but also that there is a clear relationship between municipal residents’ ideological positions and the policies that their municipalities enact (Tausanovitch and Warshaw, 2014; Einstein and Kogan, 2016). Moreover, this evidence consistently shows that ideological voting and policy responsiveness are equally apparent across municipalities of all population sizes (Sances, 2018; Schaffner et al, 2020).…”

Representation in American Cities: Who Runs for Mayor and Who Wins?

“…A variety of evidence from observational data, surveys, and survey experiments suggests that in nonpartisan electoral settings, voters use information or signals about candidates’ partisanship when they are available (Schaffner, Streb and Wright 2001; Sen 2017; Squire and Smith 1988). Recent studies of local elections suggest that voters do indeed learn about candidates’ relative ideological positions over the course of a campaign—even when some common information shortcuts are absent or uninformative—and that evaluations of ideology influence voting behavior (Holman and Lay 2020; Sances 2018). For example, Holman and Lay (2020) focus on the 2017 mayoral elections in New Orleans, a race between two Black women, both Democrats.…”

“…Recent studies of local elections suggest that voters do indeed learn about candidates’ relative ideological positions over the course of a campaign—even when some common information shortcuts are absent or uninformative—and that evaluations of ideology influence voting behavior (Holman and Lay 2020; Sances 2018). For example, Holman and Lay (2020) focus on the 2017 mayoral elections in New Orleans, a race between two Black women, both Democrats. While voters could not differentiate the candidates based on partisanship, gender, or race, the authors find that the candidates signaled their ideology via endorsements and the issues they emphasized, which allowed voters to judge which candidate was more or less liberal.…”