petardier | Entries tagged with voter behavior

There's some research that indicates voters will vote based on their preference for the face of a candidate. The researchers blended candidate faces with composite faces so the candidates would not be recognized and got the same results as the actual elections. This was done for US, UK, and New Zealand elections

I'd have to wonder if the morphed faces were truly unrecognizable. If participants in the US were viewing morphed Bush and Kerry faces, there might be a subliminal recognition going on. If participants were viewing candidates from other countries, that would reduce that chance. Now that I think of it, Bush and Kerry might well be known internationally. State or city elections from other countries would seem to have the least chance of being affected by previous recognition.

Here's a link:

http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/185430

Nope, nothing to do with Cthulhu at all - this time.

So it turns out that some budding mad scientists have been studying the effects of negative political ads on the brain. Turns out that they work by reducing empathy for favored candidates, making it less likely that a supporter who has viewed the ad will vote. Apparently, negative ads don't get people to switch sides. They also don't work on independents, though the article doesn't go into the effect of the negative ads on the independent brain. The article doesn't say whether the test subjects had to be restrained in order to get them to view all the ads.

This whole situation bothers me. If I directly prevent one person from voting by fraud or other means, I'm fairly confident that would be a crime. If I have enough money though, I can air an ad (if it's an effective one) that will prevent hundreds from voting. The person who does that isn't a criminal; he's a campaign manager! It doesn't seem right, but any sort of move to prohibit negative ads would interfere with freedom of speech.

I guess the best solution is to exercise your free will, study the facts, and don't watch the ads.

This article was in the Boston Globe on 11/4.

Though it was published 8/2004, I didn't find this till well after the election. Even though I see this as more humorous than correct, I've still tagged it along with my other voter behavior posts.

It examines the notion that some voters are motivated by spite, rather than rational self-interest. My personal guess is that maybe a few are, but I hope there aren't many. The overall tone is bleak, but it's funny as hell and does contain phrases like "Inspector Clouseau meets the Book of Revelations."

Here's a larger sample:

This is why all the talk about "personal interests" is a sham. Spite voters don't care solely about their own interests, nor are they bothered by how "the left talks as if they know what everyone's best interests are," an argument you often hear from the whiney right. What bothers spiters is that the left really does know what's in their interests. If you're miserable, you don't want to be told what's best for you by someone who's correct--it's sort of like being occupied by a foreign army with good intentions. You'd rather fuck things up on your own, something you're quite good at, and bring others down with you.

Here's a link to the whole thing:

http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/print.php?id=297

That's what it's all about. How to do it though? Logic and reason don't seem effective sometimes.

Over at Hullabaloo, Digby observes that:

It is vitally important to distinguish between the methods used to establish that a fact is a fact and the tactics used to persuade the larger public to accept that fact. They are not one and the same.

He recommends this mantra:

The President is a liar. The Democrats did not have the same intelligence as the White House did.

and then repeat this a bunch more times:

The President is a liar.

Who knew it would be that easy? Seriously though, he's got a rational for this. We're dealing with people who are emotionally attached to a delusion. Attacking the delusion won't work. Attack the emotional attachment though, and the delusion may just get dropped when the former zombie starts thinking again. It's a little more complicated than I'm making it seem in this summary, but it starts with that simple message.

Here's a link to the whole article:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_11_13_digbysblog_archive.html#113197723122820348

Changed anyone's mind lately? How did you do it?

Here's a link to part II of my earlier posts on voter behavior:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/petardier/12392.html?mode=reply

Paul Krugman, an early, outspoken, and well-informed Bush critic, wrote a NYT column called A Mythic Reality. It mentions "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," an essay on the psychology of war by Chris Hedges. Krugman relates that essay to our current situation and points out that war psychology can rally a populace behind even outright bad leaders ( eg. Galtieri in Argentina 1982). He goes on to observe that the Bush administration has taken advantage of this war psychology. To defeat it, Krugman says that Kerry must convince voters that our self-proclaimed "war president" is nothing of the kind.

What's the best way to work against this? We know that logic and reasoned argument don't always work. Krugman suggests turning the discussion to Bush's actual record. I wonder if the option of telling others that you don't feel safe with GWB in the White House might work as well. If you are asked why, then there's an opening to bring out some reasons you don't feel safe. Any other ideas?

It's probably not accessible for free on the Times site now, so try here:

http://www.pkarchive.org/column/090704.html

Hidden away in The Critics section of the August 30 New Yorker is an article on how people make decisions about voting. Here's a link to where I started to summarize this article:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/petardier/9801.html

Now for the rest of it. After pointing out that 86% of likely voters knew that Bush I's dog's name was Millie and that only 15% knew that both Bush and Clinton favored the death penalty, the article goes on to examine 3 theories of voter behavior.

The first is that electoral outcomes are essentially arbitrary. The article observes that:

Even when people think they are thinking in political terms, 
even when they believe they are analyzing candidates on the basis of their 
positions on issues, they are usually operating behind a veil of political 
ignorance.
...  

They can't hook up positions with policies.  From the point of view of democratic 
theory,  American political history is just a random walk through a series of 
electoral options.  Some years, things turn up red; some years, they turn up blue.

To me, this is deeply unappealing. There may not be perfect order but there has to be some. Doesn't there?

The next theory is that political preferences, though they may not come from a coherent internal political philosophy, do come from somewhere, and that source is elite opinion. In this theory,

Political campaigns ... are essentially 
struggles between the elite, the fraction of a fraction of the voters who have the 
knowledge and ideological chops to understand the substantive differences between 
the candidates and to argue their policy implications.  These voters communicate 
their preferences to the rest of the electorate by various cues, low-content 
phrases and images to which voters can relate and these cues determine the outcome 
of the race.  Democracies are just oligarchies with a populist face.

This theory isn't too appealing either, but I think it would be possible to amass a lot of evidence in favor of it.

The third theory is the one the article spends the most time examining. In this theory, voters use shortcuts (or heuristics in soc-sci lingo) to reach decisions about candidates without going through the drudgery of reading party platforms, listening to speeches, etc. As the article states:

... voters don't have the 
time or the inclination to assess them in depth, so they rely on the advice of 
experts... combined with their own hunches, to reach a decision.  Usually (they 
feel), they're ok.  If they had spent the time needed for a top-to-toe vetting, 
they would probably not have chosen differently.  Some voters might get in wrong in 
one direction, choosing a liberal candidate when they in fact preferred a 
conservative one,but their error is canceled out by the voters who mistakenly 
chose the conservative.   The will of the people may not be terribly articulate, 
but it comes out in the wash.

This theory is more palatable than the other two, but the shortcuts used may not be particularly accurate. The article goes on to observe that party affiliation is the principal shortcut used by voters. I don't know if party affiliation is, historically, a good predictor of behavior, but my suspicion is that it is not.

The article presents evidence that most people aren't good at voting in their own self-interest. Here's a example. Two-thirds of people in a poll supported Bush's policy of repealing the so-called death tax (estate tax would be a more accurate name). But the tax only affects the wealthiest one or two percent of the population. And it's even supported by people who believe that the increasing gap between rich and poor americans is a bad thing. That's not logical, but that's how people are answering. And that means that whatever shortcut or heuristic people are using in this case isn't providing the right answer very often. Can a bad shortcut provide acceptable results?

There may be an interesting cross-connection here between this third theory and a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds". I plan on reading it. I'll let you know what I find.

The article concludes by observing that those who aren't persuadable by ideological arguments may still be persuaded by other means. Optimism was given as one such factor. That meshes with a comment Rudy Giuliani made in a speech at LotuSphere 2003. He said that a leader has to be optimistic, that it's next to impossible for a pessimistic leader to motivate people. I'm not sure exactly how to apply this wisdom to our current campaign. Look for a post on this topic in the near future.

As I previously noted, this article isn't to be found on the New Yorker's web site. If you'd like a copy of it, get in touch. I'll send you a copy (assuming the number of requests doesn't get out of hand, that this).

Hidden away in The Critics section of the August 30 New Yorker is an article on how people make decisions about voting. With my software engineering background, I'm wired to think that important decisions should be made in a logical, deliberate way, so this article was a shock to my system. Before I get deep into the substance of the article, here's something to think about:

In 2000, eighteen percent said they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five percent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted.

That would seem to suggest that polls don't begin to mean much until just before the election. So obsessing about the polls is a waste of worry that could be better invested elsewhere.

Now for the meat of the article. After mentioning some basic factors that influence votes, the article references political scientist Phillip Converse's 1964 article "On the Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics".

Converse claimed that only ten percent of the public has what can be called, 
even generously, a political belief system.  He named these people "ideologues", by 
which he meant not that they are fanatics, but that they have a reasonable grasp 
of "what goes with what" - of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political 
philosophy.  Non-ideologues may use terms like "liberal" and "conservative", but 
Converse thought they basically don't know what they're talking about, ...  they 
can't see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought 
to rule out others (such as the belief that there should be more government 
programs).  About 42 percent of voters, according to Converse's interpretation of 
the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-
interest.  The rest form political preferences from their sense of whether times 
are good or bad (about 25 percent) or from factors that have no discernible "issue 
content" whatever.  Converse places 22 percent of the electorate in the last 
category.  In other words, about twice as many people have no political views 
as have a coherent political belief system.

Any political scientists out this have comments on this? I'd be especially interested to know if these numbers have been re-checked recently.

Unfortunately, this article isn't to be found on the New Yorker's web site. If you'd like a copy of it, get in touch. I'll send you a copy (assuming the number of requests doesn't get out of hand, that this).

This post has become quite large; I'll save the rest for later.