Local Bandwagoning and National Balancing: How Uninformed Voters Respond to the Partisan Environment

Scholarly debate on civic competence often assumes that political knowledge is the prerequisite for systematic and “correct” decision-making. Uninformed voters, then, are portrayed as unsystematic and misguided decision-makers. The current study challenges this assumption by arguing that uninformed voters may not rely on (potentially misguided) individual preferences but rather refer to the partisan environment, the partisan voting patterns in past elections, to guide their decisions. The analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and American National Election Studies (ANES) provides the supporting evidence to this claim. Uninformed voters respond to the partisan environment in two ways: First, they bandwagon with the local partisan environment; second, they balance against the national partisan environment. The results provide the view of uninformed voters as more systematic and effective decision-makers than previously suggested. ∗Gento Kato is Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science, One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 (gkato@ucdavis.edu). The previous version of this paper was presented at the 77th Annual Midwest Political Science Association Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, April 6, 2019. The latest version of this paper is available at https://github.com/gentok/UninformedChoice. In the studies of voter competence, the non-randomness and “correctness” of voting decisions are believed to be strictly increasing in the level of political knowledge. Uninformed voters, under this view, are portrayed as the most unsystematic and misguided decisionmakers. Their individual preferences are unstable (Converse 1964, Zaller 1992), internally inconsistent (Broockman 2016), or misinformed (Kuklinski et al. 2000, Fowler and Margolis 2014). The evidence often leads to the conclusion that uninformed voting cannot be explained systematically. Any deviation of uninformed votes from informed votes (Bartels 1996) is attributed to biased preference formation of uninformed voters. Yet, this conclusion is the assumption rather than the explanation of the nature of uninformed voting. Previous studies rarely explore the possible reasoning behind uninformed voting patterns. Given this gap in literature, this paper asks the following research question: how can the behavior of uninformed voters be systematically explained? There are two propositions. First, I argue that individual preferences do not explain the behavior of uninformed voters. Uninformed voters know that their preferences are weakly reasoned and potentially biased, and thus have no incentive to use their own preference to inform their decisions. Second, partisan environment, represented by aggregated partisan voting patterns from past elections (Miller 1956, Putnam 1966), explains uninformed voting. If a voter is informed, he or she has no reason to refer to partisan contexts. For uninformed voters, however, two contrasting sets of logic, bandwagon and balance, explain how and why contexts can be useful for their voting decisions. This paper consists of two studies that assess the implication of context-based uninformed voting. Both studies test propositions through the analysis of American presidential elections. The first study assesses the role of local partisan environments through the 2008 and 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), and the second study examines the role of national partisan environments through 1972–2016 American National Election Studies (ANES). The empirical results show that uninformed and informed voters base their decisions