Book Description

Scholarly debate on civic competence often assumes that political knowledge is a prerequisite for systematic and "correct'' decision-making. Uninformed voters, then, are portrayed as unsystematic and misguided decision-makers. The current dissertation challenges this assumption by arguing that uninformed voters respond systematically to their surrounding electoral environment. I use a combination of empirical and formal analyses to support this argument. In the empirical chapters of the dissertation, three analyses are conducted. My first and second analyses assess the claim that uninformed voters may not rely on (potentially misguided) individual preferences but rather cue off the partisan voting patterns in past elections (i.e., partisan environment) to guide their vote choices in elections. An analysis of Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) and American National Election Studies (ANES) provides supporting evidence for this claim. Uninformed voters respond to the partisan environment in two ways: First, they bandwagon with the local partisan environment; second, they balance against the national partisan environment. My third analysis examines the phenomenon of uninformed abstention. Using public opinion survey data on 81 initiatives offered across 13 states during the 2012 presidential election, the results suggest initiative-level electoral environments explain the patterns of uninformed abstention as predicted by the formal model analyzed in the current dissertation. The theoretical chapters in this dissertation analyze a model that integrates recent findings from several prior formal models. Here, the development in formal models of election makes two sets of findings that question the custom to treat voter information as a prerequisite for competent democratic decision-making. One argues that uninformed abstention is an effective strategy to approximate informed electoral outcome and another suggests that uninformed voters may motivate strategic political elites to improve accountability. My theoretical chapters bridge and extend two findings by analyzing strategic incentives in the comprehensive voting model with abstention and its connection with electoral accountability. The proposed model offers a contextual explanation for two contrasting logic in uninformed abstention -delegation and discouragement- and shows that uninformed voting sometimes improves accountability. Furthermore, uninformed abstention is more effective in generating democratically preferred outcome under delegatory than discouraged context. The results reveal that the context and logic of abstention have a significant implication on the competence of low-information voting. In sum, the results provided in this dissertation offer the view of uninformed voters who are more systematic and effective decision-makers than previously suggested, responding to electoral environments. Furthermore, if the strategic interaction between voters and policymaker is considered, electoral environment can also condition the relationship between uninformed voting decisions and democratic accountability. Additionally, the current analytical strategy provides multifaceted understandings of the problem through the combination of empirical and formal assessments.