Lost in Space? Information Shortcuts, Spatial Voting, and Local Government Representation

Abstract

Voters face difficult choices in local elections, where information about candidates is scarce and party labels often do not distinguish candidates’ ideological positions. Can voters choose candidates who represent them ideologically in these contexts? To address this question, we conduct original surveys that ask candidates in the 2011 mayoral election in San Francisco to take positions on local policy issues. We ask voters their positions on these same policy issues on a written exit poll. We use these policy positions to construct comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology (i.e., ideal points). Within the exit poll, we experimentally manipulate cues to examine their effects on voters’ candidate preferences. We observe a strong, positive relationship between voter ideology and the ideology of the candidates they choose in the election. However, our experiments show that endorsements from political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations weaken this relationship. These findings challenge the view of local elections as nonideological and demonstrate that spatial voting theory can be usefully applied to local settings. They also indicate that voters may not treat political party and newspaper endorsements as signals of candidates’ ideological positions, but rather as nonideological signals of partisan affinity or candidate quality/viability.

Racial or Spatial Voting? The Effects of Candidate Ethnicity and Ethnic Group Endorsements in Local Elections

“…Scholars in recent years have developed methods for creating comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology (Boudreau, Elmendorf, and MacKenzie , ; Jessee ; Joesten and Stone ; Shor and Rogowski ) . One method combines candidates’ known policy views with surveys that ask voters whether they support those policies.…”

The Effect of Associative Racial Cues in Elections

“…The findings from this paper also add nuance to the cross-racial mobilization literature, which largely uses observational analyses to assess the successes and failures of candidates in high-profile elections. The present paper, which relies on experimental analyses and a lowsalience election, shows that cues may operate differently in elections of varying degrees of salience (Bernhard and Freeder, 2018;Boudreau, Elmendorf, and MacKenzie, 2015a;2015b).…”

“…Yet, we know relatively little about accountability and representation, nor what shapes voting behavior in these elections (Trounstine 2010;Warshaw 2019). Racial cues embedded in the campaign materials for these elections may then lead voters to make incorrect conclusions about candidates and cast ballots that they would not otherwise (Boudreau, Elmendorf, and MacKenzie, 2015b). We explore precisely this proposition in the real-world context of the Wilson/Austin contest described above.…”

Student-Run Exit Polls 101

“…Indeed, in addition to some of our team members, several other faculty have published work based on student-collected data. For example, Barreto et al (2006); Benjamin and Miller (2017); Bishop and Fisher (1995); Boudreau, Elmendork, and MacKenzie (2015); Brown et al (2006); Druckman and Parkin (2005); and Stewart, MacIver, and Young (2008).…”