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Citizens in representative democracies receive party endorsements and policy information when choosing candidates or making policy decisions via the initiative process. What effects do these sources of information have on public opinion? We address this important question by conducting survey experiments where citizens express opinions about initiatives in a real-world electoral context. We manipulate whether they receive party cues, policy information, both, or neither type of information. We find that citizens do not simply ignore policy information when they are also exposed to party cues. Rather, citizens respond by shifting their opinions away from their party's positions when policy information provides a compelling reason for doing so. These results challenge the prominent claim in public opinion research that citizens blindly follow their party when also exposed to policy information. They also suggest that efforts to inform the electorate can influence opinions, provided that citizens actually receive the information being disseminated.

Relatively few scholars assess the conditions under which cues improve citizens’ decisions. I analyze experimentally the conditions under which one cue (the statements of an endorser) enables both sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens to improve their decisions. My results demonstrate that the effectiveness of this cue depends upon the endorser's incentives and citizens’ levels of sophistication. Specifically, I find that under idealized conditions (i.e., when the endorser always has an incentive to make truthful statements), this cue dramatically improves the decisions of (and closes the gap between) sophisticated and unsophisticated subjects. When the endorser's incentives are more realistic (i.e., the endorser may have an incentive to lie), this cue affects sophisticated versus unsophisticated subjects differently: sophisticated subjects do not improve their decisions, whereas unsophisticated subjects typically improve their decisions enough to make them comparable to sophisticated subjects. Thus, even under more realistic conditions, the gap between sophisticated and unsophisticated subjects closes.

In The Democratic Dilemma, Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins addressed a question of enduring importance: Can citizens learn what they need to know to make informed political decisions? Before The Democratic Dilemma, many scholars offered pessimistic answers (Bartels 1996; Converse 1964; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). These answers were based on surveys showing ordinary citizens’ ignorance of basic facts about politics (e.g., the name of their senator and who nominates Supreme Court justices). Rather than assuming that such factual knowledge is necessary for informed decision making, Lupia and McCubbins developed a novel theory that identified the conditions under which uninformed citizens can learn from others. To rigorously test their theory, they designed laboratory and survey experiments. The result was a more optimistic picture of citizens’ capabilities and the health of our representative democracy. This article highlights the contributions that The Democratic Dilemma made to three distinct areas of research. First, I discuss its contributions to research on political sophistication. I argue that The Democratic Dilemma inspired scholars to investigate whether citizens differ in their ability to learn from information they receive. Second, I describe The Democratic Dilemma’s contributions to research on political endorsements. Chief among these are questions the book raised about whether and when endorsers are perceived as knowledgeable and trustworthy in real-world settings. Third, I discuss The Democratic Dilemma’s contributions to neuroscience research that investigates learning and decision making. Together, these contributions shed new light on the circumstances under which different types of citizens in various political environments can trust and learn from others.

Income inequality has risen dramatically in the United States, with potentially negative social, economic, and political consequences. Governments can use redistributive taxes to combat inequality, but doing so requires public support. When will voters support redistributive taxes? Using the dual-process framework, we make predictions about the conditions under which party cues and information about rising inequality affect support for redistributive taxes. We test these predictions by conducting survey experiments in a real-world electoral context. We find that although citizens are misinformed about the extent of inequality, information that corrects their misperceptions helps them express tax policy opinions that are consistent with their preferences for lower levels of inequality. We also find that citizens who are motivated to process inequality information systematically respond to it even when it conflicts with their party’s position. These results identify conditions under which efforts to inform the electorate about inequality can increase support for taxes.

Incidents of police violence can undermine trust in legal authorities. Whether such incidents have this effect will depend on how citizens evaluate victims, the police, and public officials. Citizens’ evaluations may be shaped by information about (1) a pattern of police violence and (2) government responses. We study citizens’ reactions to police violence by randomly assigning these two types of information in the context of the Stephon Clark shooting in Sacramento. We find that information influences levels of blame for and trust in the police, but the effects depend on citizens’ race and whether they live in the community where the violence occurred. In contrast, information does not alter citizens’ perceptions of local police officer organizations and, in turn, their willingness to follow police endorsements in elections. These results suggest a catch-22 whereby police violence can diminish the standing of police personnel, but favorable local opinion preserves their political influence.

With the growth of Latino and Asian American populations, candidates frequently must appeal to diverse electorates. Strategies for doing so include emphasizing candidates' racial/ethnic identity and securing endorsements from racial/ethnic groups. While many scholars focus on candidates' racial/ethnic attributes, ethnic group endorsements are understudied. Whether such endorsements induce voters to choose ideologically similar candidates (spatial voting), or choose based on race/ethnicity (racial voting) is unclear. We address this question by examining elections in multiethnic local settings. Using original surveys and exit polls, we create comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology, and examine how race/ethnicity and ideology affect voters' choices. We also embed experiments that manipulate ethnic group endorsements. We find that ideology influences voters' choices, but that ethnic group endorsements weaken spatial voting. The latter effect among whites is driven by racial/ethnic stereotypes. These reactions explain why some candidates seek such endorsements and why others might prefer to avoid them.

Citizens are typically uninformed about politics and know little about issues at stake in direct democracy elections. Government efforts to inform electorates include requiring donors to initiative campaigns to report their activities and then circulating such donor information to citizens. What effects does donor information have on citizens' opinions? We conduct a survey experiment where respondents express opinions about initiatives in a real-world election. We manipulate whether they receive donor information, party cues, policy information from a nonpartisan expert, or no additional information. We find that donor information influences citizens' opinions in the aggregate, with effects comparable to those of party cues and policy information. However, donor information has negligible effects on uninformed citizens, who have difficulty inferring donors' policy interests and connecting them to their own. These results underscore the potential benefits of efforts to inform electorates via disclosure laws and highlight disparities in their effectiveness for informed and uninformed citizens.

Many scholars lament citizens' lack of political sophistication, while others emphasize that information shortcuts can substitute for sophistication and help citizens with their political choices. In this paper, I use experiments to assess whether and under what conditions institutions can substitute for sophistication and enable even unsophisticated citizens to make informed decisions. The results of my experiments demonstrate that institutions, such as a penalty for lying or a threat of verification, can help both sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens to make more informed decisions. Further, my results suggest that institutions may, under certain conditions, level the playing field between sophisticated and unsophisticated citizens.

Voters face difficult choices in local elections, where information about candidates is scarce and party labels often do not distinguish candidates' ideological positions. Can voters choose candidates who represent them ideologically in these contexts? To address this question, we conduct original surveys that ask candidates in the 2011 mayoral election in San Francisco to take positions on local policy issues. We ask voters their positions on these same policy issues on a written exit poll. We use these policy positions to construct comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology (i.e., ideal points). Within the exit poll, we experimentally manipulate cues to examine their effects on voters' candidate preferences. We observe a strong, positive relationship between voter ideology and the ideology of the candidates they choose in the election. However, our experiments show that endorsements from political parties and newspapers with ideological reputations weaken this relationship. These findings challenge the view of local elections as nonideological and demonstrate that spatial voting theory can be usefully applied to local settings. They also indicate that voters may not treat political party and newspaper endorsements as signals of candidates' ideological positions, but rather as nonideological signals of partisan affinity or candidate quality/viability.

To address the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie choices made after receiving information from an anonymous individual, reaction times (Experiment 1) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 2) were recorded as participants played three variants of the coin toss game. In this game, participants guess the outcomes of unseen coin tosses after a person in another room (dubbed 'the reporter’) observes the coin toss outcomes and then sends reports (which may or may not be truthful) to participants about whether the coins landed on heads or tails. Participants knew that the reporter's interests were aligned with their own (common interests), opposed to their own (conflicting interests) or opposed to their own, but that the reporter was penalized every time he or she sent a false report about the coin toss outcome (penalty for lying). In the common interests and penalty for lying conditions, participants followed the reporter's reports over 90% of the time, in contrast to <59% of the time in the conflicting interests condition. Reaction time results indicated that participants took similar amounts of time to respond in the common interests and penalty for lying conditions and that they were reliably faster than in the conflicting interests condition. Event-related potentials timelocked to the reporter's reports revealed a larger P2, P3 and late positive complex response in the common interests condition than in the other two, suggesting that participants’ brains processed the reporter's reports differently in the common interests condition relative to the other two conditions. Results suggest that even when people behave as if they trust information, they consider communicative efforts of individuals whose interests are aligned with their own to be slightly more informative than those of individuals who are made trustworthy by an institution, such as a penalty for lying.