VOTER SOPHISTICATION AND ELECTION VISIBILITY

The preceding discussions have demonstrated the different ways in which voters can make candidate evaluations. Whether a voter primarily considers a candidate's past record, ideological commitments, party membership, or other characteristics depends upon some of the variables presented above, such as the voter's ideology and party identity, as well as the type of election (nonpartisan, party primary, or partisan). Two more variables play an important role in influencing candidate evaluations. The first consideration is a voter's political sophistication.

---

As deflned by Robert Luskin, a person is politically sophisticated "to the extent to which his or her political cognitions are numerous, cut a wide substantive swath, and are highly organized…. A political belief system that is particularly large, wide-ranging, and organized is an ideology."^[56] The more politically sophisticated a person becomes, the more likely it is that he or she will pay close attention to elections, search out diverse information sources, and critically examine messages received.

A highly sophisticated or "politically aware" voter is more able and inclined to think and vote based upon complex information about candidates in an election. Moderately sophisticated voters seek out a modest amount of political information and make some effort to relate it to what they know about political parties and their own interests. The least sophisticated voters only learn about candidates passively, when the candidates reach out to them through television, radio, and other media, and these voters do little to process the information they receive. Using data on political ideology and involvement and the category definitions presented above, roughly a third of voters fall into each of these three categories.^[57]

How a voter of low or high political sophistication evaluates candidates also depends upon the nature of the campaign itself. In particular, elections vary in the overall intensity of candidates' campaigns and the media coverage of those campaigns. At the high end of the spectrum is the presidential election, to which there is no comparison. Every day for weeks, if not months, voters are pelted in a hailstorm of information and opinion about the presidential candidates. The intensity of the presidential campaign is so great that it saturates the consciousness of even the most reclusive voter, and only a few high-visibility races for governor or the U.S. Senate compare to it in intensity.

Because of its importance and stature, the presidential election has attracted the most attention from scholars of voting. The most influential works on voting have studied presidential elections, and this narrow focus may have caused past research to overgeneralize from the one anomalous election to others.^[58]

Campaigns of moderate intensity, such as typical gubernatorial or

U.S. Senate elections, cost far less than a presidential race. Spending only a million dollars or so, a candidate can usually make voters aware that an election is taking place with modest television and radio advertising and a professional campaign organization. In a small town, just a few thousand dollars and a large grassroots effort can create a campaign of sufficient visibility that voters know the candidates by name

---

when they arrive at the polls or flll out their absentee ballots. Political scientists normally call these "low-information" races because relatively few political messages reach voters.^[59]

But there is a stratum of elections beneath even the so-called "lowinformation" races, and here lie most elections for public office. The vast majority of election research has focused on presidential and congressional elections, but those elections are for only one of the over 80,000 governments across the United States. Most races for office in the 50 state governments are very low-proflle, as are the vast majority of elections to office in over 3,000 counties, 19,000 municipalities, 16,000 townships, 14,000 school districts, and over 33,000 other special districts across the United States^[60] Most voters are hardly aware of these elections and may not even know a single fact about the candidates until they see names and other details on the ballot. In Texas judicial races, for example, roughly four-fifths of voters could not recognize the names of major candidates just minutes after voting. In 1976, because he shared a familiar surname—Yarbrough—with a former senator and gubernatorial candidate, voters unwittingly elected to the Texas Supreme Court a candidate who claimed he "took his instructions from God."^[61] The lowest of the low-intensity races even surprise some voters, who proclaim, "I didn't know there was an election" for the state legislature, county council, municipal judgeship, or school board. As Harry S Truman once remarked about a local elected office in Pittsburgh, "What in the hell's a prothonotary?"^[62]

Local representatives, as well as the more obscure state elected officials, barely make a blip on the average citizen's radar. As James Fishkin muses, "I know almost nothing about most of the 200 to 350 people^[63] [who represent me], and they certainly know almost nothing of me. Public awareness of these elections is sometimes so low that turnout is under 20 percent or even below 10 percent. Capitalizing on this fact, the Christian Coalition began targeting local elections in 1990 because it knew that a small, activist core could prove decisive in them. Victory required few votes, and "stealth candidates" could win support without voters knowing what special interests they actually represented.^[64]

Table 2 brings together voter sophistication and campaign visibility to demonstrate how candidate evaluation varies depending on these two variables, plus the partisan nature of voters and elections.^[65] The table identifles the primary evaluation method of different combinations of voters and elections. The four evaluation methods can be summarized as decision-making shortcuts used by voters to select candidates:

---

1. Name: If little is known about the candidates, vote for the candidate with the more familiar name. If some positive and negative personal information is known about candidates (e.g., incumbent went to the same school as the voter or dresses poorly), average those considerations and choose the candidate with the best average rating.
2. Media: Average all media messages (e.g., campaign ads, news-paper/television campaign coverage) received and choose the candidate with the best average rating. All messages are treated as being equally credible and relevant.
3. Party: Choose the candidate who shares the same party affiliation as the voter.
4. Ideology: Excluding messages provided by elites with a dissimilar ideology (e.g., ads produced by ideologically dissimilar organizations, endorsements by ideologically dissimilar newspaper editors), average all media messages received and choose the candidate with the best average rating.

---

For ease of presentation, table 2 includes a few simpliflcations. The flgure substitutes "awareness" for political sophistication, and it collapses awareness into two categories—unaware and aware. Table 2 also collapses ideological and political sophistication into one variable. Voters with high political awareness are presumed to both attend to political messages and to approach them with a clear ideological orientation. In reality, most voters falling into one category also fall into the other, but a minority of ideologues lack political sophistication and vice versa. For the same reason, campaign intensity is collapsed into two categories—low- and high-visibility. The dividing line between those categories is, roughly, a moderate-intensity congressional election.

In a typical low-visibility nonpartisan or primary election, the Name model best describes candidate evaluation. Because they have no party affiliation, independent voters also select candidates using Name in lowvisibility partisan elections. If asked to explain why they voted the way they did, these voters might say they "preferred" their candidate of choice, without any deeper explanation, or they might admit that they simply chose the one candidate whose name they recognized or whose hand they had shaken.^[66] In a high-visibility election, independent voters with low political awareness use the Media voting method because they receive a signiflcant number of mass media and advertising messages about candidates.^[67] Low-awareness partisan voters also use the Media evaluation method in high-visibility party primaries and nonpartisan races. Having received some relevant media messages, many of these voters will be able to recall more substantial arguments for and against candidates; some may even be able to mention key candidate actions and use those as a partial basis for voting.^[68] Party is the primary evaluation method for partisan voters in partisan races, with one exception: partisan voters with high political awareness use their ideological sophistication to fllter media messages and identify the optimal candidate.^[69] Highly aware independent and partisan voters use this Ideology method in every high-visibility election, although true independents have considerable difficulty identifying like-minded ideological elites in highly polarized media environments.

Table 2 is a crude summary portrait of candidate evaluation, but it makes clear two of the central points in this chapter. First, only partisan voters with high political awareness use party or ideology to evaluate candidates in three of the four types of elections. If only 20 percent of the public is ideological, and 20 percent of those are independent,

---

roughly 15 percent of the electorate votes using partisan or ideological cues for most types of elections. Second, only high-visibility partisan elections trigger ideological or partisan voting for three of the four types of voters. Not only are these elections the exception, but they are nearly all coupled with party primaries in which only a fraction of the electorate makes ideological candidate evaluations. In sum, most voters in most elections are making simplistic candidate evaluations.