June 2, 1998
Media Contact: Dolores Davies, (619) 534-5994 or [email protected]
UCSD POLITICAL SCIENTISTS PONDER VOTER DECISION MAKING
It's Election Day. An exhausted businesswoman rushes into the voting booth five minutes before the polls close and in less than three minutes, punches through her ballot to indicate her preferences. As she votes, she vaguely recalls the political ads she saw on television a few nights ago, the few pieces of direct mail at which she cast a cursory glance, and the passing comments made by an acquaintance about a certain proposition. These recollections, as well as the ten minutes she spent the previous evening perusing the sample ballot, form the basis for her voting choices.
While this may not sound like democracy at its best, the vast majority of voters says Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, use such limited information to make what Lupia calls "reasoned choices" in the voting booth. Lupia and fellow UCSD political scientist Mathew McCubbins discuss their theories about how voters learn, gather information, and make decisions, in their recent book, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? (1998, Cambridge University Press).
While many critics of democracy claim that people who lack information are incapable of reasoned choice, Lupia and McCubbins argue that people who lack information solve enormously complex problems everyday. They do so by making effective use of the information available to them, sorting useful information from useless information. "It is widely believed that there is a mismatch between the requirements of democracy and most peoples' ability to meet these requirements," say Lupia and McCubbins. "However, making reasoned choices does not require full information -- it requires the ability to predict the consequences of actions."
To compensate for a lack of information and knowledge when making political decisions, voters tend to follow certain patterns of behavior. According to Lupia, this includes substituting advice from others for information they lack, relying on political institutions, and choosing to disregard certain sources of information over others. He and McCubbins argue that "People use limited information to make reasoned choices in many areas of their lives, not just in the voting booth -- they take medication without knowing all of the conditions under which it is harmful. They also buy houses based on limited information about the neighborhoods around them and with little or no information about the neighbors. People make choices in this way not because the information is unavailable, but because the costs of paying attention to it exceed the value of its use."
In their book, Lupia and McCubbins draw on the fields of psychology, communication, and cognitive science, as well as political science and economics, to construct and test theories of attention, persuasion, and delegation. The outcome of this process is a series of models that explain how people learn from others, how people choose whom to believe, and when they decide to use judgmental shortcuts and cues to replace complex information.
"There exists a centuries-old debate about what democracy should do," say Lupia and McCubbins. "We can make this debate more constructive by clarifying the relationship between what information people have and what types of decisions they can make. Our book is about determining the capabilities of people who lack political information. It is designed to resolve debates about how much information voters, jurors, and legislators need to perform certain tasks."
Lupia was recently honored by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his contributions toward our understanding of the importance of knowledge, learning, and persuasion to political decision making by voters, legislators, and jurors. Lupia is the recipient of the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research, and is the first political scientist to receive this prestigious award.
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