Arthur Lupia

SHORTCUTS VERSUS ENCYCLOPEDIAS: INFORMATION AND VOTING BEHAVIOR IN CALIFORNIA INSURANCE REFORM ELECTIONS

Voters in mass elections are notorious for their apparent lack of information about relevant political matters. While some scholars argue that an electorate of well-informed voters is necessary for the production of responsive electoral outcomes, others argue that apparently ignorant voters will suffice because they can adapt their behavior to the complexity of electoral choice. To evaluate the validity of these arguments, I develop and analyze a survey of California voters who faced five complicated insurance reform ballot initiatives. I find that access to a particular class of widely available information shortcuts allowed badly informed voters to emulate the behavior of relatively well informed voters. This finding is suggestive of the conditions under which voters who lack encyclopedic information about the content of electoral debates can nevertheless use information shortcuts to vote as though they were well informed.

Promoting an open research culture

Author guidelines for journals could help to promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility Transparency, openness, and reproducibility are readily recognized as vital features of science (1, 2). When asked, most scientists embrace these features as disciplinary norms and values (3). Therefore, one might expect that these valued features would be routine in daily practice. Yet, a growing body of evidence suggests that this is not the case (4–6).

The Growth and Development of Experimental Research in Political Science

Although political scientists have long expressed skepticism about the prospects for experimental science, an analysis of the first hundred volumes of the American Political Science Review reveals that randomized experiments have grown in impact and prominence. We document how thinking about experimentation has evolved over the century, and demonstrate the growing influence of laboratory, survey, and field experiments. A number of experiments have transformed how political scientists think about causal relationships in specific substantive areas. There are limits to the kinds of questions that experiments can address, but experiments have made important contributions in an array of political science subfields.

Views from Inside the Net: How Websites Affect Young Adults' Political Interest

We use multiple methods to examine how individual websites affect political interest (i.e., citizens’ willingness to pay attention to politics at the expense of other endeavors). Our model clarifies necessary conditions for a website to increase political interest. A survey then reveals age-related and site-specific interest changes that are consistent with the models logic. Respondents of all ages report greater political interest after viewing sites that they rate as effective and efficient than they do after viewing other sites. Age-related interest effects occur because young and old disagree about which sites have these desired attributes. This work makes two contributions: our methods offer a template for understanding the influence of participatory appeals while our finding can help political entrepreneurs engage young adults more effectively.

Redefine Statistical Significance

We propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005 for claims of new discoveries.

How elitism undermines the study of voter competence

Abstract A form of elitism undermines much uniting on voter competence. The elitist move occurs when an author uses a self‐serving worldview as the basis for evaluating voters. Such elitism is apparent in widely cited measures of “political knowledge” and in common claims about what voters should know. The elitist move typically limits the credibility and practical relevance of the analysis by leading writers to draw unreliable conclusions about voter competence. I propose a more constructive way of thinking about what voters know. Its chief virtue is its consistency with basic facts about the relationship between information and choice.

Representation or abdication? How citizens use institutions to help delegation succeed

Modern democracy requires delegation. Oneproblem with delegation is that principals andagents often have conflicting interests. A secondproblem is that principals lack informationabout their agents. Many scholars conclude that theseproblems cause delegation to become abdication. Wereject this conclusion and introduce a theory ofdelegation that supports a different conclusion. Thetheory clarifies when interest conflicts andinformation problems do (and do not) turn delegationinto abdication. We conclude by arguing that remediesfor common delegation problems can be embedded in thedesign of electoral, legislative, and bureaucraticinstitutions. The culmination of our efforts is asimple, but general, statement about when citizens andlegislators can (and cannot) control their agents.

Campaign competition and policy responsiveness in direct legislation elections

Many scholars, pundits, and reform advocates argue that more competitive elections are needed to produce policy outcomes that better reflect voter interests. We challenge this argument. Using a model of direct legislation elections, we prove that greater electoral competition is neither necessary nor sufficient for more responsive postelection policy outcomes. Instead, we find that more competition increases responsivenessonly if the additional competitors are both sympathetic to voter interests and sufficiently credible to affect voter behavior. If either condition fails to hold, then increasing competition will make votersworse off, if it affects them at all. We conclude that enhanced voter competence, and not more competition, is the key to greater responsiveness.

Communicating science in politicized environments

Many members of the scientific community attempt to convey information to policymakers and the public. Much of this information is ignored or misinterpreted. This article describes why these outcomes occur and how science communicators can achieve better outcomes. The article focuses on two challenges associated with communicating scientific information to such audiences. One challenge is that people have less capacity to pay attention to scientific presentations than many communicators anticipate. A second challenge is that people in politicized environments often make different choices about whom to believe than do people in other settings. Together, these challenges cause policymakers and the public to be less responsive to scientific information than many communicators desire. Research on attention and source credibility can help science communicators better adapt to these challenges. Attention research clarifies when, and to what type of stimuli, people do (and do not) pay attention. Source credibility research clarifies the conditions under which an audience will believe scientists’ descriptions of phenomena rather than the descriptions of less-valid sources. Such research can help communicators stay true to their science while making their findings more memorable and more believable to more audiences.

Designing Bureaucratic Accountability

We investigate the extent to which legislators can use institutional design to adapt the the challenges presented by the complexity of policy making. In so doing, we produce new and more general conclusions about the consequences of institutional design for democratic decision-making and conclude that, in general, democracy can work.