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9 February 2008

Searching for the next President...

It is an interesting and important question how voters search for information about candidates. Presumably, in a democracy, one hopes that institutions push people to deliberate about the choices before them, because (1) it would normatively be a good thing that the collective choice reflects the balance of well-thought out opinions about the direction of the country, (2) that the (individual) deliberative process has a cumulative effect on people’s knowledge and preferences, and (3) thinking about the collective choice helps forge a civic identity.

Political science often offers a rather pessimistic view of the capacity of voters to make informed decisions. However, this view is often based on an overly static of the voter. (I will blog another day regarding a paper that I am working on with Kevin Esterling and Mike Neblo on this subject.) Voters (arguably) search for information on an as-needed basis. Much of that search is around nonhuman sources (e.g., news media), and much of it human sources (e.g., friends and family). One of the nice things about the Internet, as I have written before, is the digital record people leave of their behavior (as compared, for example, to casual conversations). So here’s a little fun with google trends: Below are two figures from google trends, one for google searches for the names of each of the remaining candidates for President over the last 30 days in the whole country, and one for Washington State, which is holding its caucuses today.

I would note that for the first figure, of the top 10 states that conducted these searches, 8 were Super Tuesday states, one was DC, and one was South Carolina. Put together, these figures offer a glimpse of how the campaign drives people’s search for information about the candidates; and they also offer a hint of who people are looking for information about. An emphasis needs to be put on the word “glimpse” because we are drawing on a particular sample of searching behavior. What types of people look where for what types of information? The contrast shows up quite clearly between Paul and Huckabee is illuminating, where Paul is relying on an Internet-based network, and Huckabee more of a church-based network. One suspects that this figure thus over-represents the relative number of people looking for information about Paul.

HERE IS THE KEY:

Blue: Obama
Red: Clinton
Yellow: McCain
Green: Paul
Purple: Huckabee

Posted by David Lazer at February 9, 2008 2:24 PM

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