News Coverage and Strategic Voting in Primaries

• In Event: Parties and the Media: New Research and Directions for Study

Abstract

This paper investigates whether news coverage of multi-candidate House primaries provides the information necessary for voters to engage in strategic voting a la Duverger’s Law. This would be information to 1) identify the top two candidates and 2) distinguish between them on political grounds. Absent this information, voters risk wasting their votes on candidates having little chance to win.

As it turns out, 85 percent of voters give their support to one of the top two candidates, which is the convergence in plurality elections that Duverger sought to explain with his famous law. But the convergence is probably not due to strategic voting since most newspapers do not provide the minimal information required for it.

Much communications research on election coverage plays off “issues” against “horserace,” with warmer feelings for the former. We are novel in arguing that both are needed in a particular combination for rational voting. Also, our measurement of political substance is not simply whether issues are mentioned, but whether the coverage meaningfully distinguishes the top two candidates. Group endorsements are a big source of the politically distinguishing information we find.

Authors

• Kathleen Bawn, University of California, Los Angeles

• Shawn Thomas Patterson

• John R. Zaller, University of California, Los Angeles