Click Here to retrieve paper archive file. Abstract Abstract Political sophistication is increasingly recognized as a factor of great importance in models of individual political behavior. This paper examines what happens to these two effects of political sophistication during campaigns. General political information is employed as an empirical indicator of sophistication. As campaigns proceed, the level of heterogeneity decreases, the contribution of information to the explanation of behaviour declines, the individual deviations from high information shrink, and the effectiveness of aggregation sometimes improves.
Campaigns serve a crucial function, they allow voters to make more enlightened voting decisions.
Individuals would not make the same choices had they not experienced these campaigns, and the final outcomes could therefore have been much different.