The Simplest Shortcut of All: Sociodemographic Characteristics and Electoral Choice

Abstract

Voters' decision criterion of last resort is their similarity to candidates or party leaders. Most normative theories would denigrate this form of reasoning. But the recent argument that voters can make up for information shortfalls by employing heuristics seems to require that the most poorly informed respond to these characteristics if they are to make anything other than a random decision. In this article I test the hypothesis that increasing dissimilarity of sociodemographic characteristics from a political figure (e.g., party leader) decreases a voter's expected utility from the election of that person. Secondarily, I ask whether decreases in a voter's store of policy information will necessitate greater reliance-a tendency to "fall back"-on this similarity0dissimilarity criterion. I draw on survey data from two Canadian federal elections with adequate variation in party leader characteristics. A model of vote choice is estimated by conditional logit. All voters are found to respond negatively to increasing sociodemographic distance from party leaders, net of partisanship, economic retrospections, policy, and uncertainty. Voters equipped for policy voting do not ignore these characteristics, and voters without policy information do not respond more strongly to their similarity or dissimilarity to party leaders. Models of voting behavior nearly always include sociodemographic vari-ables measuring characteristics of voters. One persuasive and enduring conceptualization is that many voters think that candidates and party leaders who share a voter's characteristics are more likely to act in that person's interest when in office. Yet this form of reasoning has been denigrated from a normative point of view as an irrational last resort of the ill-informed (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954). More recently, though, it has been portrayed as a "shortcut" that might compensate for a lack of information on candidates' policy positions. That is, voters who do not gather enough policy information or do not have opinions on the issues fall back on "demographic cues" (Popkin 1991, 63-4). Committed optimists might even suggest that the poorly informed could partially close the gap with the better informed if the latter ignore these simple shortcuts because they are less accurate than policy voting.The revisionist approach maintains that citizens with different levels of sophistication or information use different raw material in their decisions or combine decision criteria in different ways. Sniderman, Glaser, and Griffin (1991), for example, show that better educated voters make comparative assessments

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