Biased Knowledge and Learning of Candidates' Issue Positions

• In Event: Biased Perceptions and their Influence on Opinion

Abstract

The question of whether and to what extent political campaigns inform voters has long been a focal point in the scholarship on citizen competence in democratic systems. From this scholarship, we know that the likelihood that voters will learn candidates’ issue positions is influenced by a wide range of factors, from voter sophistication to candidate ambiguity to issue salience. Less attention has been paid to the possibility that voters’ learning about where candidates stand on issues may be influenced by the implications of those positions for the voters’ candidate preferences. Specifically, voters may be more likely to learn positions held by their preferred candidate with which they agree and positions held by their nonpreferred candidate(s) with which they disagree, because this knowledge affirms (rather than undermining) their decision to prefer one candidate over the other(s). I assess this possibility using panel survey data from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I find that voters were significantly more knowledgeable of their preferred candidates’ positions (both individually and as a platform) when they themselves shared those positions, and of their nonpreferred candidates’ positions when they themselves did not share those positions. Critically, I demonstrate that this bias is not merely a misinterpretation of policy voting: even when controlling for their initial biases toward preference-affirming position knowledge, voters learned more about candidates’ issue positions the more they agreed with their preferred candidate or disagreed with their nonpreferred candidate. These findings suggest that the capacity of campaigns to improve voter decision-making may be attenuated by confirmation bias: if voters disproportionately receive or retain information that validates their priors, they are unlikely to recognize when they form candidate preferences against their own issue interests.

Author

• Ben Kantack, Georgia Gwinnett College