Gender and Electability: A Survey Experiment on Voter Beliefs and Information Acquisition

2024-03-26

2024-04-22

Voter beliefs on candidate electability

Voter beliefs are elicited through incentivized guesses about candidate poll rankings.

Political awareness/engagement, voting

Political awareness/engagement and voting are self-reported by participants.

In this survey experiment, we investigate the belief formation of voting-age US adults on candidates' electability in congressional races. Respondents' familiarity with congressional candidates is likely to vary depending on their level of political awareness and their proximity with the state in which candidates are running. There are three sets of hypotheses we would like to test. The first concerns respondents' perceptions and whether these are systematically incorrect. We also check how this varies with respondents' self-reported level of political awareness and sources of information. The second line of inquiry centers on respondents' information acquisition: when given the choice, which candidates respondents prefer to receive additional information on, and how this additional information affects their perceptions. The third question is whether voters’ political engagement is correlated with their perceptions on which candidates are viable, e.g. whether voters are discouraged by beliefs that their preferred candidates are unlikely to win.

Our study takes the form of an online survey measuring voters' political awareness and knowledge. As part of this, we ask respondents to guess poll rankings of existing candidates in the 2024 elections. We randomly vary the framing of the question to place more or less emphasis on the importance and the competitive nature of the runoff race, as well as the perceived identity of the opponent (e.g. stating the name of the male incumbent or the female frontrunner from the opposing party). In addition, we allow respondents to make information-acquisition choices with respect to candidates and their characteristics by offering clickable options on the screen. We then again elicit respondents’ beliefs about the candidates based on the information they received. In addition to their baseline remuneration, participants are entered in a draw for a monetary prize of $25, with their chances increasing in their number of correct responses to incentivize them to guess correctly. Participants are asked to refrain from making use of google search, and time limits are used to deter such attempts. To measure political engagement, we ask respondents about their recent participation in activities such as attending political speeches, volunteering for or donating to campaigns, and we ask them whether they intend to vote. We also conduct list experiments focused on the link between (mis)perceptions and voter turnout.

Randomization done by Qualtrics.

Individual respondent

No

60

60

60