Are You Picking Up What I Am Laying Down? Ideology in Low-Information Elections

Autor: Mirya R. Holman, J. Celeste Lay
Rok vydání: 2020
Předmět:
Zdroj: Urban Affairs Review. 57:315-341
ISSN: 1552-8332
1078-0874
DOI: 10.1177/1078087420908933
Popis: In November 2017, New Orleans elected the first woman, and first Black woman, mayor in the city’s history. Voters were unable to rely on gender, race, or partisanship to differentiate between the candidates in the race. How, then, do voters make decisions absent traditional heuristics? Using an analysis of campaign materials and two-wave panel survey, we show that the candidates sent ideological signals with endorsements and issue foci and that voters responded by placing the candidates ideologically. Those voters who could not differentiate between the candidates’ ideologies were less likely to turn out to vote and took longer to decide in the elections. Using a new measure of relative ideological distance adopted for multicandidate races, we show that the distance between each voter and the nearest candidates correlated with vote choice. Our results add to our knowledge of voting behavior and the use of ideology in local elections.
Databáze: OpenAIRE