No abstract

Informed voting is costly: research shows that voters use heuristics such as party identification and retrospection to make choices that approximate enlightened decision-making. Most of this work, however, focuses on high-information races and ignores elections in which these cues are often unavailable (e.g. primary, local). In these cases, citizens are on their own to search for quality information and evaluate it efficiently. To assess how voters navigate this situation, we field three survey experiments asking respondents what information they want before voting. We evaluate respondents on their ability to both acquire and utilize information in a way that improves their chances of voting for quality candidates, and how this varies by the sophistication of respondents and the offices sought by candidates. We find strong evidence that voters use "deal-breakers" to quickly eliminate undesirable candidates; however, the politically unsophisticated rely on unverifiable, vague, and irrelevant search considerations. Moreover, less sophisticated voters also rely on more personalistic considerations. The findings suggest that voters' search strategies may be ineffective at identifying the best candidates for office, especially at the local level.

That voters punish the incumbent president in bad times, and reward them in good times, has become a stylized fact of elections. Despite COVID-19 representing an unprecedented catastrophe, Trump’s approval ratings, unlike other world leaders, remained stable throughout 2020. To explore this puzzle, we surveyed the same Americans twice before the 2020 election—a period when COVID cases spiked. Instead of finding that the crisis’s severity affected Trump’s approval, we find the reverse—perception of the crisis depended on one’s prior political predispositions. People who already supported Trump were more likely to underestimate COVID fatalities and case rates, and less likely to perceive the crisis as worsening over time (daily infections doubled between interviews). Those who perceived the crisis to worsen, but continued to support Trump, expressed unwillingness to blame the president. A public so polarized that it fails to acknowledge disaster, or attribute blame, cannot hold its government accountable.