IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v57y2013i2p312-325.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Heuristics Behaving Badly: Party Cues and Voter Knowledge

Author

Listed:
  • Logan Dancey
  • Geoffrey Sheagley

Abstract

Party cues provide citizens with low‐cost information about their representatives’ policy positions. But what happens when elected officials deviate from the party line? Relying on the 2006 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we examine citizens’ knowledge of their senators’ positions on seven high‐profile roll‐call votes. We find that although politically interested citizens are the group most likely to know their senator's position when she votes with the party, they are also the group most likely to incorrectly identify their senator's position when she votes against her party. The results indicate that when heuristics “go bad,” it is the norm for the most attentive segment of the public to become the most misinformed, revealing an important drawback to heuristic use.

Suggested Citation

  • Logan Dancey & Geoffrey Sheagley, 2013. "Heuristics Behaving Badly: Party Cues and Voter Knowledge," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 57(2), pages 312-325, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:57:y:2013:i:2:p:312-325
    DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5907.2012.00621.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2012.00621.x
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/j.1540-5907.2012.00621.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aaron R Kaufman & Eitan D Hersh, 2020. "The political consequences of opioid overdoses," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(8), pages 1-10, August.
    2. Julia Partheymüller & Sylvia Kritzinger & Carolina Plescia, 2022. "Misinformedness about the European Union and the Preference to Vote to Leave or Remain," Journal of Common Market Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 60(5), pages 1449-1469, September.
    3. John Kuk & Deborah Seligsohn & Jiakun Jack Zhang, 2022. "The partisan divide in U.S. congressional communications after the China shock," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(3), pages 494-526, July.
    4. Maxime Walder & Oliver Strijbis, 2022. "Negative Party Identification and the Use of Party Cues in the Direct Democratic Context," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 10(4), pages 325-335.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:57:y:2013:i:2:p:312-325. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.