Study’s authors say voters ‘irrational’
Published: Sunday, December 30, 2012 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, December 29, 2012 at 6:20 p.m.
MONTGOMERY | A new study of what makes voters choose incumbents says some voters arrive at their decisions irrationally.
The Cambridge University Press says, “A new study has thrown doubt on the ability of the average voter to make an accurate judgement of the performance of their politicians, showing that voter biases appear to be deep-seated and broad.”
Researchers Gregory A. Huber of Yale University, Seth J. Hill at the University of California, San Diego, and Gabriel S. Lenz at the University of California, Berkeley, said voters are susceptible to biases even when facing financial rewards to act differently and even when countering information is available.
“Irrational” behavior, the authors called it.
Huber said he believes voters do the best they can.
“I don’t think they are stupid — they do a remarkably good job given all the other things they have to think about and all the efforts that are made to persuade them,” he said. “They are still imperfect, and in important ways, but it is important to understand both the nature and magnitude of those distortions.”
The study is titled “Sources of Bias in Retrospective Decision Making: Experimental Evidence on Voters’ Limitation in Controlling Incumbents.” It was reported in the latest edition of the American Political Science Review published by Cambridge University Press.
The three political science professors asked about 4,000 people to play a series of games assessing the performance of fictional politicians.
The study did not mention any candidate, political system or political party in determining that events such as hurricanes, lotteries and other actions clearly outside the control of politicians can be used to place blame.
“The findings suggest that incumbents who associate themselves with good news for which they bear no responsibility, implement policies that generate good news close to elections at the expense of overall voter welfare and use rhetoric that encourages people to focus on how they feel in the here and now, ignoring the long-term, could benefit at the ballot box,” the study concluded.
According to Huber, “Our results suggest severe limitations in humans’ ability to accurately and impartially judge the performance of politicians. This is a worrisome finding for democratic accountability because it creates a breeding ground for politicians to manipulate their electorate.
“They tended to punish or reward the incumbent based on whether or not they had won or lost a lottery, and gave greater weight to earnings closer to the election when they learned about the election closer to it or after certain rhetorical statements,” the study said.
Voters “persisted in this irrational behavior” even when told the fictional incumbent had nothing to do with the lottery or events closer to the election were no more informative of the incumbent’s true performance than events further from the election, the study said.
In an email, Huber said even in very simple settings and when given financial incentives to behave otherwise, voters show important biases.
When voters aren’t paying attention, they appear to give about twice as much credence to recent events as overall performance when choosing whether to re-elect an incumbent, Huber said.
Secondly, they give incumbents about 40 percent credit for events they can’t control over events they can control, even though they know the incumbent can’t control the event, he said. The study mentions hurricanes.
And, simple rhetoric like “how satisfied are you right now” can cause voters to give disproportionate weight to recent performance relative to overall performance, he said.
The study said schools and the media are to blame, partly.
“The findings also raise a warning about the adequacy of civic education programs and media coverage of elections to help citizens to accurately judge the performance of their representatives,” the study said. “Understanding how to improve voter decision-making may have important implications for democracy.”
The authors say voters respond to “irrelevant but salient information when evaluating an incumbent.”
“Random and uncontrollable events, such as droughts, hurricanes, shark attacks, and even sporting event outcomes appear to influence voters’ decisions to retain incumbent politicians,” the study said, citing previous studies.
Voters seem to evaluate information that is “arguably irrelevant to understanding the competence and effort of incumbent politicians.”
“Analyzing presidential elections from 1896 through 2000, for example, (two other researchers) find that moderate deviations from ideal moisture levels in a state decrease the incumbent president’s party’s vote share by 0.7 percentage points, whereas extreme droughts or wet spells decrease it by about 1.5 percentage points,” the authors said.
In other words, raindrops falling or not falling on voters’ heads determine their political choices. “Although these random events appear to influence voters, we do not know why,” the authors said.
A possibility, though, is that voters hold incumbents responsible because they believe incumbents could have prevented disasters or could have sought to soften their effects, the authors said.
For example, say a hurricane hits a major city. Even though voters know it wasn’t the incumbent’s fault, he or she may get blamed.
“In the event of a damaging flood, for instance, voters may believe that the incumbent could have invested more heavily in flood prevention or provided more effective disaster assistance,” the study said. “A second possibility is that voters may know the incumbent is not responsible for a bad event, but may be unable to take that information into account when making a decision.”
The authors said “rational voters act on the basis of a knowingly imperfect (rules of thumb) because doing otherwise is too costly.”
The authors said that incumbents may manipulate the economy or surround themselves with symbols of “good” as campaign strategies.
“Experiments imply that manipulating the election-year economy and directing campaign rhetoric on the here and now” improve the incumbent’s chances of re-election “regardless of cumulative performance,” the study said.
The authors, who referred to numerous previous studies by other researchers, said it’s possible to interpret their study differently.
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