What the 2020 Election Can Teach Us About Influencing Voters
Research has shown that the capacity for political campaigns to influence voters is small in partisan general elections and decreases as Election Day approaches.
Many social scientists have interpreted this to mean that people remain loyal to one political party and resist crossing lines as their partisanship becomes more activated the closer they get to casting a ballot. But this pattern might also be explained by the way voters accumulate and process information. The partisan affiliation of a candidate provides a strong prior basis for a voter’s beliefs, which are perhaps less likely to change when additional information is added as the campaign draws to a close.
In a new paper released this month, Institution for Social and Political Studies (ISPS) Resident Faculty Fellow Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, offer evidence for that second interpretation, demonstrating how information processing and not only partisan loyalty can influence voters’ choices.
https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2022/08/what-the-2020-election-can-teach-us-about-influencing-voters