How Do Voters Respond to Information? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign

By Chad Kendall, T. Nannicini, Francesco Trebbi. Social Science Research Network, 2013

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Rational voters update their subjective beliefs about candidates' attributes with the arrival of information, and subsequently base their votes on these beliefs. Information accrual is, however, endogenous to voters' types and difficult to identify in observational studies. In a large scale randomized trial conducted during an actual mayoral campaign in Italy, we expose different areas of the polity to controlled informational treatments about the valence and ideology of the incumbent through verifiable informative messages sent by the incumbent reelection campaign. Our treatments affect both actual vote shares at the precinct level and vote declarations at the individual level. We explicitly investigate the process of belief updating by comparing the elicited priors and posteriors of voters, finding heterogeneous responses to information. Based on the elicited beliefs, we are able to structurally assess the relative weights voters place upon a candidate's valence and ideology. We find that both valence and ideological messages affect the first and second moments of the belief distribution, but only campaigning on valence brings more votes to the incumbent. With respect to ideology, cross-learning occurs, as voters who receive information about the incumbent also update their beliefs about the opponent. Finally, we illustrate how to perform counterfactual campaigns based upon the structural model.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d6f347c55a22e6add6ce6efb94baf018c167e25e

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Citations in the corpus

Political Advertising and Election Results (2018, background): “Another exception is a recent field experiment by Kendall et al. (2015), who collaborated with an Italian mayor to send voters randomized messages. Relative to the control group, voters who received campaign messages about the mayor’s valence updated their beliefs and increased their support by abou”
Factorial Designs, Model Selection, and (Incorrect) Inference in Randomized Experiments (2019, methodology): “26 How Do Voters Respond to Info mation? Evidence from a Randomized Campaign Kendall et al. (2015) study a field experiment with 3 × 2 design in which voters are given information in different ways.”
Designing Information Provision Experiments (2020, methodology): “…experiments, researchers have used information treatments to study voting behavior (Aker et al., 2017; Cruz et al., 2021, 2018; Gerber et al., 2020; Kendall et al., 2015; Orkin, 2019) or to study strategic behavior of political activists (Hager et al., 2020, 2021) and protesters (Cantoni et al.,…”
Misperceptions About Others (2021, background): “Kendall et al. (2015) inform people of the competence and stance of the city managers via their political slogans.”