Mental Economy and Voter Rationality: The Informed Citizen Problem in Voting Research

Abstract

A striking paradox of voting research is that, despite persuasive theoretical explanations of why voters are likely to be ignorant and empirical confirmation of voter ignorance, there has been substantial evidence of "issue voting" by large segments of the American electorate. This paper explains this paradox in terms of a heuristic that voters might use to simplify voting decision problems. Evidence from the 1980 CPS National Election Study tends to confirm the view that apparent voter ignorance may actually reflect efficient information processing--i.e., mental economy behavior.

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