Cumulative Knowledge in the Social Sciences: The Case of Voters' Information

• In Event: What Do We Know in Election Research?

Abstract

What happens when voters become better informed about their representatives' actions or performance? The empirical literature reports mixed findings on incumbents’ electoral fortunes for both good and bad news. We introduce a political agency model, meant to inform empirical research, in which voters are fully rational, unconstrained, and unbiased. We show that researchers should not expect information campaigns to always work or produce similar effects. Identical interventions in similar contexts can give different results. The same intervention measured in different ways can give different results. The analysis also highlights that the comparability of empirical estimates is non-monotonic in the geographical spread of observations. We offer recommendations to improve the accumulation of knowledge. By constructing variables related to governance outcomes and interacting them with treatment status in their regression analyses, researchers can recover fully comparable estimates of information treatment effects. Further, to avoid attenuation bias, good and bad news should be defined in absolute, not relative terms.

Authors

• Federica Izzo, UCSD

• Torun Dewan, London School of Economics

• Stephane Wolton, London School of Economics