Heuristics Behaving Badly: Party Cues and Voter Knowledge

Abstract

Party cues provide citizens with low‐cost information about their representatives’ policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens’ knowledge of their senators’ positions on seven high‐profile roll‐call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics “go bad,” it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.

The “Prejudiced Personality” and the Origins of Partisan Strength, Affective Polarization, and Partisan Sorting

“…The current study cannot make a determination one way or another, although I believe the effects of need for closure are more consistent with a perspective of blind group conformity than a rational choice theory of party cue effects. However, I would echo the claims of past research (e.g., Achen & Bartels; Dancey & Sheagley, ) that either mechanism can lead people astray and is therefore problematic. Whether they blindly follow party elites or make a conscious decision to do so, elite polarization increases the likelihood that respondents (especially those high in the need for closure and politically engaged) form an ideologically incorrect judgment.…”

The Buck Stops with the Education Mayor: Mayoral Control and Local Test Scores in U.S. Urban Mayoral Elections

“…Wood and Porter ). Further, misperceptions are most common and stable in the face of opposing information among those on the extremes (Dancey and Sheagley ; Taber, Cann, and Kucsova 2009). As such, we expect that improvements in test scores likely serve as confirmation for those who have the most positive evaluations of schools, whereas they contradict beliefs for those with the most negative opinions of schools.…”

“…First, voters should know about the scores and understand their meaning in reference to the mayors authority. A great deal of research indicates that such knowledge is in limited supply (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996;Somin 2013). Further, voters tend to rely on the most recent information, even if it forms an incomplete or inaccurate picture of an officials overall performance (Bartels 2008;Healy and Lenz 2014;Huber, Hill, and Lenz 2010;Tversky and Kahneman 1973).…”

Inferences Made Easy

“…Constituents tend to project their own views onto representatives and senators who they like (Alvarez & Gronke, 1996;Feldman & Conover, 1983;Wilson, 2012;Wilson & Gronke, 2000). In addition, Dancey and Sheagley (2013) argue that the public relies extensively on party cues to identify their senators' positions on key issues, and when senators defect from the party line, it causes high levels of misinformation, especially among the most politically engaged segments of the electorate. Importantly, Wolpert and Gimpel (1997) conclude that voters with incorrect information about their senators' positions use these incorrect impressions in their voting decisions.…”

“…For instance, Ansolabehere and Jones (2010) examine the effect of policy agreement between voter and representative on individual-level approval and vote choice and, at least implicitly, assume that this process is the same regardless of characteristics of representatives. Similarly, Dancey and Sheagley (2013) assume that the effect of senators deviating from the party line on knowledge of roll call votes is the same for all constituencies in their sample. We believe that focusing solely on the individual level misses important heterogeneity across senators in how these processes play out.…”