Does Learning During Campaigns Help Voters Make Better Decisions?

• In Event: The Campaign, Issues and Salience

Abstract

Scholars typically think that more information will help voters make better decisions. Current evidence suggests that voters learn about candidates' policy stances during election campaigns but that their newly-acquired knowledge fails to lead them to change their vote preferences. However, most of the research on learning during campaigns comes from the United States, where the two-party system limits voters’ opportunities to change their preferences. Using an original panel survey we are running in the context of the 2022 French presidential election, we evaluate how much voters learn about the candidates’ positions during the election campaign in a multi-party system. We also assess whether that knowledge leads them to change their candidate preferences. We expect to find similar amounts of learning as in US studies, however, given the greater number of options, we expect voters in multi-party France to be more likely to change their candidate choices in response to learning.

Authors

• Eric Guntermann, University of California, Berkeley

• Gabriel Lenz, UC Berkeley

• Romain Lachat, Sciences Po