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20 March 2006

Lau on Voter Decision Making

Last Friday at PPBW, Richard Lau of Rutgers University presented a paper co-authored with David Redlawsk entitled "How Voters Decide: Four Strategies of Voter Decision Making, and Their Consequences," which is part of a larger book project on the topic. The authors present four models of voter decision making: 1.) the rational choice approach, where voters gather as much information as possible about all the candidates; 2.) the confirmatory approach, where voters rely on longstanding predispositions like party ID; 3.) a "fast and frugal" approach, where voters gather information about all candidates but on just a few relevant dimensions, and finally 4.) the "intuitive" decision making approach, where voters start their search with one candidate chosen at random and then keep searching until an acceptable alternative is found. Somewhat unexpectedly, the rational choice approach seemed to fare the worse in helping voters make "correct" decisions.

The authors designed experiments in which they could monitor how voters picked their candidates in mock presidential primary and general elections. Voting "correctly" was defined as when voters chose candidates that were aligned with their pre-experiment policy predispositions. Models 3 and 4 - which the authors classify as "boundedly rational" approaches - seem to fare the best in the four candidate primary experiment. Model 2 - in which voters rely on party ID - also did quite well in the general election. Model 1, however, did poorly, which seems to suggest that more information is not always better.

Questions were raised about whether these four models are mutually exclusive, whether voters might use different strategies at different times, and also how voting "correctly" can be defined outside of the policy predisposition context. Nevertheless, these results are sure to cause debate, particularly among those who view the rational choice model of voting more favorably.

Posted by Ian Yohai at March 20, 2006 12:48 AM