Informed Change, for Some: Political Information Encounters and Elite Performance Judgments

Representative democracy requires that citizens express informed political opinions. To do so, they must not only have access to relevant factual information and absorb what they need to know, but also use the acquired facts to update opinions accordingly. However, it remains unclear if citizens make “informed updates” of political judgments when relevant facts are available to them in a real-world media environment. Drawing on data from a two-wave panel survey and media content analysis, this article examines if exposure to facts about elite performance in the media alters judgments about such performance by way of inducing performance-relevant information. It also examines how this indirect exposure effect differs for people with different levels of motivation and sophistication for processing new political information. We find that relevant information encounters do not only induce learning, but can indirectly also change associated judgments as people use what they learn from exposure to revise these judgments. But our results also reveal how such impact of exposure is conditioned by personal characteristics: it is pronounced only among moderately sophisticated individuals with above-average motivation. 94 Informed Change, for Some One of the most prominent democratic norms advocated in public opinion research is that citizens’ political judgments ought to be informed by relevant facts. Whether polities and publics meet all of the requirements in the real world, however, often remains unclear. Are citizens provided with the facts needed to form and update opinions? As most political elite activity materializes beyond their immediate experience, citizens heavily depend on the media environment for supply of such information. Do citizens wholly absorb the facts when they encounter them? People cannot apply the facts, one would presume, without at least registering them. And finally, do citizens really use the information they acquire from encounters with political information to update associated evaluations and preferences? That people learn about political leaders and policies, after all, need not mean that they update their views about them accordingly. Supposedly, if each of these conditions – information availability, acquisition, and appliance – is fulfilled in reality, representative democracy rests on a solid foundation (Kuklinski, Quirk, Jerit, Schwieder, & Rich, 2000). And yet, we know remarkably little about whether, and if so for whom, all of the above questions can indeed be answered affirmatively. As the availability and acquirement conditions must be met before the appliance condition can be, scholars have done much to identify the sources of political information as well as the factors that facilitate or hinder its reach and reception (Althaus et al., 2011; Barabas & Jerit, 2009). However, if political information is first and foremost a prerequisite to making competent decisions, it is paradoxical that almost no observational studies have explored the impact of information transmission beyond differences in learning. Instead, “most of the research on political information acquisition,” writes Druckman (2005a), “treats information itself as the ultimate dependent variable” (p. 517). As political information provides much of the foundation for citizen competence (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996), this focus in research may be understandable. But as a result, the common presumption that inspires much of the political learning literature – that acquiring the facts matters for related opinions – remains just that: a presumption; one that, especially in real-world settings, has rarely ever been put to a formal test. An informed citizenry may be preferable over an ignorant one, but as Gilens (2001) notes, “the practical question is whether political judgments would be any different if citizens were better informed” (p. 379). In order to better understand if, and under what circumstances, citizens are capable of meeting the requirements that representative democracy imposes on them, we need to know what happens when people naturally encounter political information that is pertinent to making informed judgments. The empirical analyses reported in this article explore the conseDynamics of Political Information Transmission 95 quences of encounters with information-inducing media coverage relative to public evaluations of elite performance. The outputs and effectiveness of political elites – that is, what they do and accomplish, or fail to – are among the primary targets to be monitored by citizens if they want to hold their leaders accountable for their actions and ensure proper representation (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Wlezien, 1995). Drawing on data from a two-wave panel survey and media content analysis, we ask if exposure opportunity to facts about elite performance in the media alters judgments about such performance by way of inducing performance-relevant information. Specifically, we ask how this effect differs for people with different levels of motivation and sophistication for processing new political information. We examine the presence of this “conditional indirect exposure effect” in the wake of a naturally occurring major decision-making event in European politics. We thus also broaden the focus of research on information and updating by presenting new findings from outside the typically studied context of American politics (Bullock, 2011). Media Exposure and “Informed Updating” of Political Judgments Despite decades of political learning research showing that people can learn from exposure to political communication, there has been little examination of whether people connect the “objective data” they absorb about the political world with their own judgments about that world (Kuklinski et al., 2000). To be sure, evidence from a pioneering literature of survey experiments suggests that exposure to relevant information can significantly alter people’s judgments and preferences in various domains of government and policy. Gilens (2001), for example, finds that subjects who were informed about the national crime rate indicated less support for prison spending, and that those informed about the government’s budget for foreign aid were less supportive of budget cuts, relative to subjects who did not receive this information. Bullock (2011), too, finds his subjects to be responsive to policy information: their attitudes on health care were strongly affected by exposure to substantive policy details. This evidence, however, is counterbalanced by evidence from other survey-based experimental research that casts doubt on citizens’ true capabilities to use such information. For example, Kuklinski et al. (2000) find that offering subjects a set of facts pertinent to policy debates on welfare did little to influence their welfare policy preferences. “Those who were told the facts,” the authors write, “either did not absorb them or did but failed to change their preferences accordingly” (p. 803). 96 Informed Change, for Some Valuable as this original body of work is, then, the insights that emerge from it are not consistent. And what is more, survey experiments generally suffer from an important limitation: they conceivably overstate the influence of exposure relative to its typical influence in a natural information environment. Not only do experiments essentially force exposure to the treatment, they also provide an information environment that is artificially clean and by and large distraction-free. Such an environment makes it likely that subjects absorb and process the political information they are exposed to more thoroughly than in real life. Consequently, exposure effects may be easier to observe in an experiment than in the natural world (Kinder, 2007). Indeed, in a study comparing the effects of exposure on information acquisition and subsequent opinion change in survey experiments with those observed in natural experiments on identical topics, Barabas and Jerit (2010) find exactly this. “Although our survey experiments give the impression of a ‘rational public,’ one that reacts to new information in a sensible way. , we found less support for this proposition when we examined public opinion in the natural world” (p. 239). In sum, even if, in theory, political information enables citizens to review their approval of political performance and policies, it is anything but a foregone conclusion that citizens who learn the facts following relevant exposure – if they learn them at all – really use that information to update such judgments accordingly in daily life. Some, though not all, experimental studies ascertain such effects. Yet, despite the need for studies “that provide reassurance that communication effects are not confined to experimental studies” (Kinder, 2007, p. 158), scholars have only begun to explore the relationships among exposure, learning, and updating opinions in natural political information environments (Barabas & Jerit, 2010). One exception is a study by Gaines, Kuklinski, Quirk, Peyton, and Verkuilen (2007), who use panel data to examine information acquisition following unfolding events in the Iraq war and its impact on judgments about government performance relative to the war. They find that while most respondents acquired the facts crucial to assessing the costs and benefits of the war, learning did not translate into uniform opinion change but instead diverged opinions due to partisan differences. As Gaines and his colleagues conclude, “our results challenge the widespread, often implicit, assumption that people who know such facts generally use them” (p. 971). 1 Even though Kuklinski et al. (2000) observe no relationship between exposure to domain-specific facts and policy preferences, they note that their presentation of the facts “already exceeds what is likely to occur in the real world” (p. 803). Dynamics of Political Information Transmission 97 However, des