Abstract:
This paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the influence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements. We first develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources. Newspa pers are potentially biased in favour of one of the candidates and voters thus rationally account for the credibility of any endorsements. Our primary empirical finding is that endorsements are influential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorse ment. The degree of this influence, however, depends upon the credibility of the endorsement. In this way, endorsements for the Democratic candidate from left-leaning newspapers are less influential than are endorsements from neutral or right-leaning newspapers and likewise for endorsements for the Repub lican. We also find that endorsements are more influential among moderate voters and those more likely to be exposed to the endorsement. In sum, these findings suggest that voters do rely on the media for information during campaigns but that the extent of this reliance depends upon the degree and direction of any bias.Keywords:
Media Bias
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Author(s): Peris, William | Advisor(s): Lewis, Lynn V | Abstract: In a political environment where information competes with “fake news” and partisanship dictates what is believed, voters must separate the two or be deceived. Though accurate information about politicians and policies is available, misperceptions persist, and increasing polarization in the government and the electorate exacerbate the reluctance to consume information that conflicts with existing attitudes. In this paper I identify the sources of information that affect people’s ability to correctly place Congressional candidates on the ideological spectrum and the factors that are associated with misperceptions of ideology. I draw on Bawn and Zaller’s notion of the electoral blind spot to illustrate the degree and skew of misperception in the electorate. I do this for major candidates, both incumbents and challengers, for the US House of Representatives and US Senate between 2006 and 2014. Results suggest that voters are generally unable to discern degrees of partisanship in their candidates. Voters tend to believe candidates are more moderate than they are in reality, and this effect is greater if a candidate is a voter’s co-partisan. Additionally, voters project their own ideological self-identification onto their candidates: The distance a voter considers themself to be from the ideological center influences, proportionally, how far the voter perceives candidates from either political party to be from the center. I examine the relationship between these effects and electoral outcomes to find limited evidence that voters practice proximity voting generally, with only small vote share penalties for candidates who are distant from the mean voter, but I find an effect of misperception of candidate ideology in the outcome of those elections in which better informed voters are less likely to vote for more extreme candidates. The heterogeneity of misperception and the projection of one’s own ideology onto candidates are previously unexplored, but not inconsistent effects on the conception of the electoral blind spot. In voter perceptions of moderation and the combined effect of misperception and candidate proximity, I find evidence consistent with the presence of an electoral blind spot as a set of policies or candidate positions over which the voter is indifferent.
Affect
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Theories of low‐information rationality claim that uninformed voters can compensate for their lack of political knowledge by employing heuristics, such as interest group endorsements, to make voting decisions as if they were fully informed. Critics of low‐information rationality contend that politically unaware voters are unlikely to use group endorsements effectively as a heuristic since they are unlikely to know the political relevance of interest groups. We address this debate by entertaining the possibility that contextual information coupled with a source cue may enhance the effectiveness of group endorsements as a heuristic. We test competing expectations with a field experiment conducted during the 2006 election in two highly competitive Pennsylvania statehouse races where a well‐known liberal interest group endorsed Democratic candidates and canvassed both core supporters and Republicans believed to be likeminded. Our results reveal that Republicans used the endorsement as a negative voting cue and that the group's endorsement helped some Republicans compensate for their lack of awareness about politics.
Heuristics
Grassroots
Relevance
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Voting in presidential primaries provides a challenging task for citizens given the lack of party cues, the candidates’ marginal policy differences, and the low levels of information about a large number of competing candidates, especially compared to general elections. As a result, the news media coverage of presidential primaries has the potential to profoundly influence voters’ views of candidates. However, our understanding of how the news media influence citizens’ decisions in primaries relies almost exclusively on the examination of national news coverage. Given voters’ heavy reliance on local news sources and the scant information that citizens possess about presidential primary candidates, local news coverage may be particularly influential. Using panel data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP), I examine the influence of the quantity and tone of local news coverage on voters’ evaluations of presidential candidates over the course of the primary season. I find that the amount of local news coverage influences people’s willingness to evaluate presidential candidates. In addition, evaluations of low tier presidential candidates are significantly influenced by the tone of local news coverage, even after controlling for voters’ personal characteristics and local candidate activities. These findings suggest that local news coverage has a powerful effect on voters’ evaluations of candidates and may ultimately impact vote choice in nominating contests.
Tone (literature)
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Newspaper endorsements played an important and measurable role in determining the outcome of the 1964 Illinois at-large election for state representatives. In this election, it was possible to vote for 177 candidates. To help the electorate cope with this major voting task, newspapers throughout Illinois provided information generally not available elsewhere, as well as recommendations which could be used compatibly with party loyalties. Localism and the endorsements of civic and special interest groups also affected voting in this election, but less so than newspaper endorsements. Aggregate statistics provide the basic and most appropriate data source for these conclusions.
Localism
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Ballot measures offer voters the opportunity to shape policy decisions directly. It remains unclear, however, if direct democracy asks too much of voters. Do voters have the capacity to make informed decisions on ballot measures that have important and far-reaching policy consequences? The common wisdom in the academic literature is that voters routinely use endorsements from elite cue-givers — such as prominent political figures, interest groups, and political parties — to arrive at an informed decision despite their lack of specific knowledge about the measures under consideration. We examine the degree to which this description is accurate in the case of direct democracy by surveying individuals about three ballot measures in North Carolina and California during their respective 2012 presidential primaries. The three ballot measures covered subjects that voters consider frequently in many states: same-sex marriage, term-limits, and taxation. We find that, contrary to the common wisdom, the ways in which individuals use endorsements to inform their decisions, while efficacious for some individuals, is highly conditional. In our surveys, campaign endorsements were informative to voters less than half of the time; but they can be quite effective for some subsets of the electorate. Our findings raise important questions about how voters evaluate ballot measures, and whether voters can make competent policy choices via the initiative and referendum.
Referendum
Direct Democracy
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Much research assumes that voters know or can learn the positions their representatives take on key issue. Arthur Lupia found that voters could learn such information through advertisements and interest group endorsements. We examine whether these cues improve voters’ ability to infer their representative’s voting behavior and find that most interest groups fail to do so. In a follow-up study, we find that voters are ignorant of which positions the interest groups take on issues. Finally, we run a similar experiment for representatives’ party affiliation and find that it is similarly uninformative; voters are unclear on where the parties stand on issues as well.
Conservatism
Interest group
House of Representatives
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This paper investigates the relationship between media bias and the influence of the media on voting in the context of newspaper endorsements.We first develop a simple econometric model in which voters choose candidates under uncertainty and rely on endorsements from better informed sources.Newspapers are potentially biased in favor of one of the candidates and voters thus rationally account for the credibility of any endorsements.Our primary empirical finding is that endorsements are influential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorsement.The degree of this influence, however, depends upon the credibility of the endorsement.In this way, endorsements for the Democratic candidate from left-leaning newspapers are less influential than are endorsements from neutral or right-leaning newspapers, and likewise for endorsements for the Republican.These findings suggest that voters do rely on the media for information during campaigns but that the extent of this reliance depends upon the degree and direction of any bias.
Media Bias
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Candidate valence and ideology often are considered separate, although equally important, dimensions of voters' evaluations of candidates. Yet in the polarized environment of U.S. House elections, voters do not separate candidates' ideology from quality. I hypothesize voters exhibit consistency or assimilation bias, rating candidates ideologically similar to themselves as higher quality than candidates ideologically dissimilar. Using a survey of voters and experts from recent U.S. House elections, I find that as voters' ideological distance from a candidate increases, voters' rating of a candidate's competency decreases. However, this relationship between ideological distance and candidate quality rating is conditioned on party identification for incumbents, with opposing partisanship amplifying the negative effect of ideological distance on incumbent quality rating. Experimental evidence shows that if provided only policy, party, or ideology information regarding a candidate, participants who disagree with the candidate's preferences attach negative quality assessments to the candidate. These results imply that polarization runs deeper than partisan or ideological differences - it is personal.
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AbstractDecades of research still providing no clear answer to the question of pre-election influence on voter decision making, some authors have proposed the shiftin focus to be made from research of poll to research of for effects. It is hypothesized that, for results to have any direct influence on the voters, voters must attend to published pre-election polls, they must accurately retain the results, and trust the credibility of such forecasts. Using data collected during the 2011 parliamentary election campaign in Croatia, this paper examines to what extent these preconditions are satisfied among the Croatian voters, and how they relate to certain aspects of voting behaviour, in particular, voters' intentions and expectations. Findings presented in this study demonstrate that the preconditions for effects are satisfied for, at most, one-third of the Croatian electorate. Additional analyses provide evidence for the presence of substantial effects of media polls on voters' expectations in the 2011 election run-up. However, with regard to voters' intentions, findings are more ambiguous, suggesting factors other than those analysed to be responsible for the observed differences in the intended electoral turnout and vote choice.Keywords: pre-election polls; electoral behaviour; voters' expectations; preconditions for influence1. IntroductionSince their inception in the early twentieth century, public opinion polls - especially surveys of vote intentions - have become an integral part of media coverage of election campaigns. Their growing prevalence, however, has led to some controversy: those conducting election polls have often been criticized for using imperfect data gathering methods, results are said to be open to manipulation, and crucially, election polls are believed to interfere with democratic integrity by influencing voter decision making either by altering voters' candidate preferences or their willingness to cast a ballot (Donsbach, 2001; Boudreau and McCubbins, 2010). The various hypothesized manifestations of the said influence can be split into two groups: bandwagon/underdog effects, and strategic (tactical) voting (Lang and Lang, 1984; Henshel and Johnston, 1987; Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1994). Bandwagon and underdog effects refer to reactions that some voters have to the dissemination of information about voting intentions from pre-election polls. Based upon the indication that one candidate (or party) is leading and the other trailing, a bandwagon effect implies the tendency for some potential voters with low involvement in election campaign to be attracted to the leader, while the underdog effect refers to the tendency for other potential voters to be attracted to the trailing candidate (party). The notion of strategic or tactical voting, on the other hand, is based on the idea that voters view the act of voting as a means of selecting a government. Thus they will sometimes refrain from choosing their candidate or party of first preference, if they perceive it to be only weakly supported by the others, and cast their vote to another, less-preferred, candidate from strategic considerations.A great deal of research over the past 30 years has been conducted examining the relationship between published reports of election data and the potential impact of results on voting behaviour. In some cases evidence has been found that suggests bandwagon effects are present (Marsh, 1985; Skalaban, 1988; McAllister and Studlar, 1991; Ansolabehere and Iyengar, 1994; Cotter and Stovall, 1994; Mehrabian, 1998); others have found evidence of an underdog effect (Fleitas, 1971; Ceci and Kain, 1982; Lavrakas et al., 1991); while third have shown differentiated (mixed) effects of polls on groups of voters, or have claimed no effect of polls on public opinion whatsoever (Navazio, 1977; Donsbach, 2001). Hence, in spite of decades of research, the question of poll on voter decision making remains an open one (Morwitz and Pluzinski, 1996; Blais et al. …
Opinion poll
Turnout
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Does partisan media influence people's attitudes? In particular , does media bias influence voters' attitudes toward presidential candidates? One perspective is that voters' opinions of candidates are due to other factors , such as , social relationships or work environments. In other words , the media does not matter in opinion formation. Another possibility is that television programs do influence viewers to believe a certain message. It might be the case that viewing partisan media , like Fox and MSNBC , move opinions in a direction consistent with the message conveyed. This subject is important , as the republic was formed with the intention of having informed voters , and the media plays a vital role in educating that electorate (Lippman , 1922). The American republic stands on the idea of informed voters choosing their next leader (Carpini and Keeter , 1996). But , framing theory suggests the way an issue or candidate is framed€ affects the opinions people form about those issues or candidates. This clearly strays from the idea of a rational voter forming opinions based on information only. In this study , I used the 2016 and 2012 American National Election Studies data to examine how exposure to partisan framed media affects candidate evaluations. I find that partisan media does affect people's feelings toward presidential candidates. In the next section , I review research on minimal effects , selective exposure , and framing to help answer the research question. Following that , I discuss the data and methods involved in the study. After an explanation of the methods that I used , I share my findings. In the final section , I present my conclusions of this analysis and the implications.
Framing (construction)
Framing effect
Presidential election
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