Information Heterogeneity, Complexity and the Vote Calculus

Abstract

US election studies (21 studies in total) to examine the effect of political information on the vote calculus across time and countries. In doing so, two core questions are addressed. First, do differences in political information affect how individuals arrive at their vote choice? The expectation is that there will be a positive relationship between information level and the number and difficulty of factors considered in the vote calculus. Secondly, this study tests the hypothesis that the magnitude of information effects in the decision process will be a function of the complexity of the electoral context. The findings support both hypotheses. Factors incorporated into the decision process differ across information groups, but only when the electoral context is relatively complex.Since the earliest days of the behavioral revolution, researchers have probed, picked, and prodded "the voter" in an effort to find out what prompts individuals to choose a particular candidate or party. This work has advanced our understanding of voting behavior by highlighting the influence of an array of demographic, psychological, and attitudinal factors. However, despite the remarkable depth and breadth of the voting behavior literature, there has been surprisingly little comparative work that considers how political information heterogeneity affects who employs which factors in deciding how to vote. As a result, we know very little about the systematic differences in the vote calculus that may exist across information groups and how these differences may vary across time and space. This article aims to address this gap by employing cross-time and cross-national data to examine how political information affects the factors that are incorporated into the vote calculus. 1 Unlike much of the voting behavior literature, the focus of this work is not on explaining vote choice per se . Rather, this article examines the vote decision process . More specifically, this research is interested in differences in the number and types of factors that voters incorporate into their decision process according to their level of political information. While earlier work has considered the influence of information on the vote (see Downloaded by [McMaster University] at 07:06 22 December 2014 30 J. Roya limited effort to fully dissect how information heterogeneity affects the vote calculus. One of the primary contributions that this research makes is offering an explanation of how information differences affect the vote decision process both across time and across countries. The first hypothesis tested here contends that an individual's level of political information conditions the number of factors that are incorporated into the decision calculus. However, it may be that a raw comparison of the number of factors included in the decision calculus is too crude an instrument to understand information-based differences in the decision calculus. It may be that it is not simply differences in the quantity of factors that are included that vary across inf...

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