Abstract
Voting research has historically focused primarily on predicting the outcome of elections, with the implicit assumption that if the antecedents of the outcome are understood then the process by which a voting decision is made must also have been revealed. Since voters have appeared to be unable to actually give many reasons for their vote decision, this has led to a widespread belief that voters use very little information in order to make a choice. Recently, some researchers have argued voters may be taking into account more information than has been previously believed. These proponents of an on-line model of voting have attempted to show that voters evaluate candidates on-line; that is, by updating candidate evaluations with every new piece of information as it is encountered, and thus may be using more information than they can recall. This occurs only the evaluation itself must be retained in memory; the information which informed the evaluation can be discarded and may not be available for recall when voters are asked to explain their decisions. If this on-line model is accurate, the view of voters as lacking information may be incorrect. The model has been tested, and strongly supported, in a ii series of experiments led by Milton Lodge. None of Lodge’s studies, however, test the model in a campaign environment. This project uses a computer-based presidential election simulation to compare the on-line to traditional views of voter decision-making. The results contradict the on-line model, in that memory is found to be a significant factor in the accuracy with which voters make decisions, while most of the implications of the on-line model itself fail to be supported by the data. The variance between this study and previous studies is explained by the difference in this new computer methodology which takes into account the dynamic, comparative nature of an election campaign. The computer simulation used in this study more accurately represents the environment found in a political campaign, in which information comes and goes, there are multiple candidates, and much more information is available than can be fully incorporated in voter decisions.