Beliefs about the Voting Calculus of Others

• In Event: Methods for Studying Voting

Abstract

Many theories of politics assert that individual voters make political choices based on how they expect other groups in the electorate to behave. Despite theoretical importance, little is known about how voters conceive of the voting calculus of others or how membership in different groups change beliefs about political preferences. In other words, we know little about how accurately individuals can guess the voting preferences of their peers and which characteristics are most informative. In this essay, we present new experimental measures of these quantities. Subjects in an original survey are provided information piece by piece about a randomly selected respondent to the American National Election Studies. After delivery of each bit of information, the subject provides a probabilistic belief about the respondent's vote choice with a monetary incentive for accuracy. We thus observe the informational value of each bit, which includes demographics and partisanship. In addition to the substantive contribution, the design also suggests a new method to untangle complicated causal quantities measured in surveys by asking the target population the informative value it ascribes to each quantity. This may be a path to understanding the causal relationship between multiple correlated factors (eg, race, partisanship, income) and political choices.

Authors

• Taylor Nicole Carlson, University of California, San Diego

• Seth J. Hill, University of California, San Diego