Shana Gadarian article on how information helps voters published in Urban Affairs Review
Mar 15, 2019
Voting Can Be Hard, Information Helps
Melody Crowder-Meyer, Shana Kushner Gadarian & Jessica Trounstine
Urban Affairs Review, February 2019
Abstract
Many U.S. elections provide voters with precious little information about candidates on the ballot. In local contests, party labels are often absent. In primary elections, party labels are not useful. Indeed, much of the time, voters have only the name of the candidate to go by. In these contexts, how do voters make decisions?
Using several experiments, we find that voters use candidates’ race, ethnicity, and gender as cues for whom to support—penalizing candidates of color and benefiting women. But we also demonstrate that providing even a small amount of information to voters—such as candidate occupation—virtually erases the effects of candidate demographics on voter behavior, even among voters with high levels of racial and gender prejudice.
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