[RRH] The Political Environment and Citizen Competence
[AT] The
Political Environment and Citizen Competence
Paul J. Quirk University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jennifer Jerit University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Robert F. Rich University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[ACK] We are deeply indebted to two anonymous referees for exceptionally helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also received valuable comments from members of the Citizen Competence Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. THE INSTITUTE OF GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS PROVIDED FUNDING FOR THE SURVEY ON WHICH THIS STUDY IS BASED.
[KEY] <<AU,
provide keywords for electronic version of manuscript>>
[BIO]
James H. Kuklinski is Professor of Political Science and Institute of
Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(kuklinsk@uiuc.edu). Paul J. Quirk is Professor of Political Science and
Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign (p-quirk@uiuc.edu). Jennifer Jerit is a Ph.D. Candidate,
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
(jerit@uiuc.edu). Robert F. Rich is Professor of Law, Institute of Government
and Public Affairs, and Department of Political Science, University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign (r-rich@uiuc.edu).
[SN]American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 45, No. 2, April 2001, Pp. 0B00
82000 by the Midwest Political Science Association
[AB] The political-heuristics school has credited the
political environment with providing easily used informational crutches that
enable even poorly informed citizens to make competent political judgments. We
develop a more general
approach to the environment, arguing that it can either enhance or fail to
enhance political judgment and that it affects performance through the
interaction of two kinds of effects: providing information and inducing
motivation. Using survey experiments that test citizens' ability to make
tradeoffs among competing goals for health carehealth-care reform,
we find that performance depends heavily on environmental conditions. A
combination of general information with increased motivation to act responsibly
significantly improves aggregate performance. An extremely favorable
informational environment not only enhances performance, but it even eliminates
the effects of individual differences in education and political
sophistication. The analysis points toward reforming structures that shape the
political environment as the most plausible route to improved democratic
governance.
[TXT]
From the late 1950s to the
mid-1980s, the study of citizen decision making focused almost exclusively on
the individual citizen’s cognitive capabilities and political knowledge. With
few exceptions, this research reached the familiar verdict that most citizens
know little about politics, do not care to know much about it, and often make
ill-considered and superficial judgments (Converse 1964; Sniderman 1993). An
important corollary was that the well educated and politically
sophisticated—the cognitively engaged, to use Zaller’s (1992) term—outperform
other citizens on judgment tasks (see Luskin 1987 for an excellent review).
More recently, some
scholars have argued that the political environment serves as an “informational
crutch” that assists citizens when they are making political judgments (Lupia
2000). The optimistic outlook of the political-heuristics literature, in
particular, rests on the view that the environment gives people simple judgment
tasks to perform and generally provides reliable cues to help citizens perform
them (Carmines and Kuklinski 1990; Lupia 1994; Lupia and McCubbins 1998; Mondak
1993; Popkin 1991; Sniderman 2000; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991; Wittman
1995). From this perspective, the cognitively highly engaged still outperform
the less engaged, but even the latter make reasonable choices a good part of
the time. Critics contend that the environment of contemporary American
politics provides considerably less assistance than champions of heuristics
have portrayed (see Bartels 1996;, Kuklinski and
Quirk 2000,;
and Luskin 2000 for critiques). Nevertheless, the idea that political
environments might enhance citizen performance is an important advance in
public-opinion research
This paper article develops a
more general idea: that the environment can either enhance or fail to
enhance the quality of political judgments. We argue that the environment’s
influence works through two channels: information and motivation. Using survey
experiments designed to simulate various environmental conditions, we
empirically test how these two factors and their interaction shape performance.
We also examine whether the political environment can reduce or even eliminate
the advantage that normally comes with personal attributes such as education
and political sophistication.
The specific decision-making task we consider is making tradeoffs
among competing goals that cannot all be fully achieved. We ask whether people
limit their demands on some of these goals,[1]
and find that tradeoff performance depends heavily on environmental conditions.
When people are invited to express demands concerning multiple and conflicting
goals in an environment that provides neither guidance about goal conflicts nor
motivation to take the decision task seriously, they perform as poorly as we
would expect. Most overlook tradeoffs and ask for nearly full achievement of
every goal. Moreover, the more highly educated and politically sophisticated
perform better than the less educated and unsophisticated.
The right combination of changes in the environment alters these
patterns. Introducing general information about the need for tradeoffs by
itself has no effect. Nor does, by itself, introducing an incentive to take the
decision-making task seriously. When the cue and incentive are introduced
simultaneously, however, people perform considerably better. Even so, many
still overlook tradeoffs, and education and sophistication continue to have an
independent effect. Finally, when people are given specific and credible
information about goal conflicts and options for resolving them—in a word, when
they are given highly diagnostic information—most of them rise to the occasion
and make tradeoffs. Moreover, in this extremely favorable information
environment, motivation no longer has a significant effect on the making of
tradeoffs. Nor does education or political sophistication. In an environment
that explicitly states the limits of the feasible, neither induced motivation
nor cognitive advantage appears to be necessary to tradeoff-conscious behavior.
More generally, our findings document a theoretically interesting
relationship between information and motivation as they condition citizen
decision making. Motivation has an
important effect on decision making only in an intermediate range of the
information’s diagnostic value: when the environment provides some cues about
the need for tradeoffs but does not explicitly and fully spell out the feasible
options. Without such informational cues, enhanced motivation makes no
difference; without the ambiguity, it is not needed.
Some of the influence of the political-heuristics literature arises from its normatively appealing claim that citizens can perform reasonably well by taking cues stems from parties, politicians, and interest groups. After several decades of research that portrayed citizens as lacking capability for political decision making, this view polished up scholars’ image of the citizenry and reestablished the citizen as a meaningful actor in democratic governance.
The
analytical legacy of this research lies in its sustained attention to
environmental influences on the nature and competence of citizen decision
making.[2]
An earlier perspective associated with Nie, Verba, and Petrocik’s The Changing American Voter (1976; also
see Page 1978) had credited the intensely conflicted political environment of
the 1960s with making voters more interested in issues and more able to respond
in ideological terms.[3]
But the heuristics school went beyond such historically conditioned
observations and acknowledged as a general matter what now seems self-evident:
that citizens decide in a political context that shapes the way they reach
their decisions and thus the decisions themselves. Even so, it has not answered
the obvious general question: do citizens evaluate complex issues more
effectively under some environmental conditions than under others? How, if at
all, do variations in environmental
conditions shape citizen performance?
There are compelling analytic, empirical, and even practical
reasons for exploring the effects of a wide range of environmental conditions.
To begin with, environmental conditions in real-world political settings
undoubtedly exhibit significant variation; analyzing the effects of such variations
can contribute to explaining differences in real-world citizen competence.
Scholars can use existing settings—from New England Town Meetings, to
initiative and referendum processes in many states, to public debates about
major legislation in the U.S. and other countries—as laboratories for learning how differences in information,
inducements, or both affect the quality of citizen decision making.
In addition, studying the effects of environmental conditions that
rarely exist in the real world—such as the presence of extremely strong
inducements or highly specific, reliable guidance—is essential for
understanding how the most basic, fixed features of the contemporary political
environment affect citizen performance. Attending only to currently existing
conditions is like studying the U.S. alone to determine the effects of the
separation of powers. Only comparisons to contrasting circumstances can provide
the needed perspective. Finally, research might find that some alternative
environmental conditions substantially enhance citizen performance. Not even
enthusiastic proponents of heuristics suggest that the typical real-world
environment is optimal. To discover that some environments boost competence
significantly would show that the well-documented deficiencies in citizen
performance do not reflect inherent limitations. It might point to
institutional change as a route to more effective and meaningful citizen
participation and shift the burden of improving politics from individual
citizens to political structures.
Construing the political environment as a variable requires spelling out how environments vary and with what effects. The two dimensions of variation we consider here are the diagnostic value of the information that the environment provides to citizens and the strength of the incentives that it gives them to take their tasks seriously.
The environment is the source of information on which citizens
must rely to perform a political judgment task. It is natural to think solely
in terms of the sheer volume of information—facts, arguments, policy details, and so forthetc.—that
the environment provides, on the assumption that more information is better
than less. However, this approach misses the point. A small amount of highly
pertinent information will often enhance citizen competence far more than a
mountain of peripherally relevant facts and arguments.
Rather than the volume, then, it is the diagnostic value of information that influences how well citizens
are able to cope with policy choices. Information has high diagnostic value, in
our terms, when it clearly and fully conveys the central considerations
relevant to a decision or judgment task. The diagnostic value of information is
especially high when it denotes both what factors to think about and how to
think about them.[4]
Consider the case of information for making tradeoffs. At one
extreme is the environment that not only states the need to make tradeoffs, in
general terms, but also indicates what those tradeoffs are in the given
decision. Citizens know precisely what alternatives they really have. At the
other extreme is the environment that provides literally no cues about
tradeoffs. It neither explicates what the tradeoffs are nor even reminds
citizens that they need to make them; it might even tell them, misleadingly,
that no tradeoffs are necessary. If people mentally make tradeoffs as they
strive to reach a decision, it is because they (probably unconsciously) infer
the need to do so from general knowledge and not because the political
environment tells them about it. Between the two extremes is an environment
that sensitizes the citizenry to the need to make tradeoffs without explicating
what those tradeoffs are. Essentially, citizens are told that they cannot have
it all. Then they themselves must identify the goals that are in conflict and
find a way to balance them.
The notion of diagnostic information, in this context, assumes
that well-informed observers generally agree on what the tradeoffs are. This
assumption does not always hold: critics of trade with China see a tradeoff
between achieving economic benefits and promoting human rights; advocates think
that such trade will best promote both goals; and even expert commentators who
are above the political fray do not agree on the matter. Most of the time,
however, informed observers not allied with political advocates largely agree
on what goals are in conflict, even if they disagree on their relative
importance (Margolis 1996).[5]
Without some agreement on the nature of tradeoffs among the highly informed,
there would be no basis, indeed no reason, for evaluating citizen performance
in making tradeoffs.
When students of public opinion discuss the political environment
at all, it is in terms of information. They have almost entirely overlooked
issues of effort and responsibility, as opposed to information and skill, in
political judgment. But in principle the environment can evoke more or less
motivation among citizens to take their decisions seriously.[6]
Psychologists have found that inducing motivation improves
decision making. In Sanbonmatsu and Fazio’s words (1990, p. 614; also see
Fazio 1990), the motivation an individual brings to a decision
task determines “the ‘care,’ attentiveness to detail, and thoroughness with
which … judgments are made.” (1990, 614; also see Fazio
1990). When people lack motivation, they do minimal analysis of
the matter at hand and instead rely heavily on global beliefs or attitudes.
They give up accuracy to avoid effort and stress.
The realm of politics raises two special questions about
motivation, one concerning the form of the inducements, the other their ability
to have a significant effect. Psychologists typically induce motivation by
asking subjects to form an accurate impression, say, about the quality of a
supposed student’s essay that they are asked to read. Following this lead, a
few political scientists (Lodge 1995; Rahn 1995; McGraw and Steenbergen 1995)
have induced people to form an accurate impression of candidates. At least when
it comes to evaluating policy, however, stressing accuracy is problematic.
There is usually no objectively “right” or “accurate” judgment in evaluating
policy, since predictions of outcomes and choices of values are ultimately
subject to disagreement.
The most relevant motivation in the context of evaluating policy,
then, is simply the inclination to evaluate policies thoughtfully and
seriously. Then, just as political environments can vary in the quality of the
information they provide, so can they vary in the extent to which they
encourage thoughtful evaluation. At one extreme is the environment that does
nothing to induce serious consideration of the task at hand. The contemporary
American political system, for example, often conducts political debate largely
through quips, wisecracks, and colorful metaphors that are unlikely to induce
serious reflection (compare Schlesinger and Lau 2000 on the value of metaphors
in political discourse). Citizens are rarely, if ever, exhorted to pay
attention or to take their responsibilities seriously. (Politicians and the
media take the view that "all the citizens are above average.") At
the other extreme is an environment that hammers home the importance of attending
to and thinking about the implications of one’s preference before expressing it
publicly. A political system that promotes an ideology of strenuous
participation (as in New England Town Meetings, or classical Republicanism)
will lean heavily on individual citizens to do a scrupulous job in their tasks.
And, of course, in between there can be a variety of levels of motivational
inducement. The American political environment provides a modest boost to
motivation, perhaps, through the pomp, circumstance, and elaborate attention to
fair procedure that characterize formal presidential debates. Such
circumstances may give some citizens a sense of obligation to listen and
evaluate carefully.
Note that, unlike information, which often relates to a particular
task, motivation as we construe it is not task-specific. In particular, it is
unlikely that a political environment provides inducements for citizens to take
decisions about tradeoffs seriously, apart from whatever inducements it
provides to take other decisions seriously. As we shall suggest momentarily,
however, the impact of this general state of mind depends on the nature of the
task-specific information that is available to citizens.
The second distinctive question for a political context is whether
any existing or possible political environment can successfully motivate
citizens of a mass democracy to act responsibly. On the one hand, political
motivation, unlike motivation induced in the laboratory, is in principle
susceptible to the same collective- action problem
that voting is (Downs 1957). The individual who tries seriously to evaluate a
proposed policy will not affect the policy outcome any more than a single voter
will determine the outcome of an election. A citizen's response to an
exhortation to weigh issues carefully could be, "for what?" Yet, on
the other hand, and contrary to the predictions of instrumentally oriented
rational-choice theory, people do vote; and thus they might respond to urgings
to decide responsibly. Moreover, there is evidence that people can be motivated
to contemplate distant political phenomena (Lau, Smith, and Fiske 1991).
We have considered two factors, the
diagnostic value of information and the strength of the induced motivation.
This leaves one outstanding consideration: how these two factors might work
together to influence the quality of citizen decision making. We suggest that
there are grounds for expecting an interaction between them, rather than
straightforward additive effects.
Suppose that environmental differences can induce citizens to take either a more relaxed and self-indulgent or a more serious and responsible approach to decision making. The difference that motivation will make should depend on informational circumstances. Consider the case where the environment provides no information about the need for tradeoffs. Even if strongly motivated, most people may fail to notice that responsible decision making requires balancing desired goals. If people do not even know what to attend to or to accomplish by effort, motivation will make no difference. Next consider the opposite case, where the environment identifies the relevant tradeoffs and defines the alternative choices clearly and explicitly. Even if fairly unmotivated, most citizens should respond to the need to make tradeoffs when an exceptionally informing environment has done all of the cognitive work for them. If the real alternatives are made plain as day, most people, whether motivated or not, will face up to them.
Finally, consider an intermediate informational condition. It is when the environment provides partial clarification of the decision task—suggesting to citizens that tradeoffs are necessary without explicating what those tradeoffs are—that enhanced motivation should have the greatest effect. If the environment can induce an increased disposition toward seriousness and responsibility, it should lead citizens to focus on and elaborate the sketchy information that the environment has provided, producing an overall decline in the demand that all goals be fully met.
More generally, the
effect of inducing motivation should be a curvilinear function of the
diagnostic value of the provided information (figure Figure 1[F1]).
When the environment provides no information or provides highly diagnostic
information, motivation should affect decision making little if at all. In the
one case, motivation alone is not sufficient and in the other it is not
necessary.
[SH1]Policy Tradeoffs as a Test
Citizens make a variety of decisions. They vote for candidates in primaries and general elections, vote on initiatives and referenda, express preferences about general directions of policy (more help for low income people or less), and evaluate proposed bills (a Republican welfare bill) and even specific provisions of bills (a two-year limit on benefits). We could have chosen any one of these tasks as an empirical test of our general thesis. Indeed, all of them are more familiar to citizens than making policy tradeoffs, which citizens rarely are asked to do explicitly. Why, then, consider how changes in the political environment affect the making of tradeoffs? We believe there are three compelling reasons.
First, making tradeoffs is more fundamental than any of the other tasks enumerated above. In fact, it pervades them all. In choosing among policy options, citizens and the public officials they elect inevitably must balance conflicting goals that everyone values and desires, to varying degrees. Making tradeoffs is as central to the judgment of policy as voting is to electoral democracy. The difference is that citizens know much more about voting than they do about the need to resolve goal conflicts.
Second and closely related, to the extent that citizens can express tradeoffs explicitly and realistically, they will give policymakers informative signals about their priorities. Sending such signals is what enables them to have an effective collective voice in the democratic process.
Advocates of political
heuristics would argue that sending signals about tradeoffs is not necessary:
“Let the parties make the tradeoffs, and simply support the policy option that
‘your’ party advocates.”[7]
However, when citizens are not able to deal with tradeoffs, they stand to
induce perverse behavior by policymakers. On the one hand, perceiving
resistance to tradeoffs, policymakers might use misleading rhetoric or adopt
risky policy designs to maintain the posture of giving citizens everything they
want. The debate on health carehealth-care reform in
the mid-1990s is a case in point. President Clinton announced his commitment to
six general principles for health carehealth-care
reform—choice, savings, security, quality, simplicity, and responsibility—and
promised that his plan would satisfy all of them.[8]
Republican and industry opponents attacked the plan on various grounds, but
they rarely acknowledged that their alternatives sacrificed the goal of
achieving universal coverage in the foreseeable future. Neither side addressed
tradeoffs directly. On the other hand, perceiving that they cannot deliver what
the public demands, policymakers might refrain from acting at all. The result
might be policy stalemate on issues where citizens’ tradeoff-cognizant
preferences, if expressed, would support policy change. In short, citizens will
pay for their inability to make and accept tradeoffs by suffering the effects
of unworkable policies or policy stalemate.
The final reason for focusing on tradeoffs is that it represents a demanding test of the capacity of the environment to enhance the quality of citizen decision making. Making tradeoffs is cognitively more difficult than most other decision tasks. Many studies have documented citizens’ inability to understand and resolve goal conflicts (Buchanan and Wagner 1977; Citrin 1979; Free and Cantril 1967; Ladd 1979; Modigliani and Modigliani 1987; Mueller 1963; Sears and Citrin 1982; Welch 1985; and Wilson 1983).[9] In addition, balancing valued goals is mentally discomforting. Rather than deal with the relevant tradeoffs, citizens will normally be inclined to ignore them or to rationalize them away. It is much easier to overlook tradeoffs through a form of wishful thinking than to confront them directly. In sum, if better information and increased motivation can improve citizen performance on tradeoffs, they should have similar if not even stronger effects on other types of decision tasks
This study is based on a survey of 1160 randomly selected Illinois
adults, administered in January 1996, about a year after Congress defeated the
Clinton health-care plan.[10]
Despite the dramatic defeat, the media were still carrying prominent news
stories on national health care at the time of the study. For example, the New York Times published twelve articles
on health
carehealth-care policy between December 20
1995 and January 20 1996, which is the month-long period bracketing the data
collection.
The survey employed an elaborate, integrated set of question
batteries and experimental manipulations designed to explore several aspects of
tradeoff performance on health carehealth-care reform.
We explain the various elements of the study design as we report the results.
Efforts to reform health care inevitably require making tradeoffs
among conflicting goals. Providing coverage for everyone, for example, would
almost certainly require raising taxes or insurance premiums. Maintaining the
quality of the best care would militate against achieving equal quality for
all. And requiring employers to cover their employees’ health care likely would
cause some workers to lose their jobs. Not everyone will agree on the severity
of a conflict between any two particular goals. Indeed, almost any two goals
can be reconciled with sufficient sacrifices in other areas. But few, if any,
policy experts would dismiss the need to make tradeoffs in health care overall.
Our first analysis considers whether citizens show any inclination
toward making tradeoffs when the environment, as we present it, neither
provides information relevant to tradeoffs nor motivates citizens to take their
decision-making tasks seriously. In other words, we ask whether citizens will
make tradeoffs when they must do so essentially on their own. This is a
demanding task, yet one that is commonly found in the real world. We expect to
find little evidence of tradeoffs under this most difficult of all situations.
To learn how people respond in an environment devoid of
information and incentive, we presented seven goals that health policyhealth-policy
experts consider central to debates about health carehealth-care
policy. These are: universal coverage, no loss of jobs, uniform quality of
care, no growth in government, no increases in taxes or premiums, free choice
of doctors and hospitals, and employer payment of health coverage. Respondents
were asked how much of each goal a health carehealth-care plan
had to achieve for them to find it acceptable. The 10ten-point
scales ranged from none to all of it. Note how the questions are worded. We did
not ask respondents simply to rate the importance of the goal; they could
reasonably feel that all the goals were very important. Rather, we asked how
much they would require each goal to be attained for a health policy to be
acceptable to them. We imposed no constraint on the total ratings; respondents
could rate every goal a 10 if they wished. That no single program can
realistically attain all goals was left implicit.[11]
The distributions of responses
to the seven goals appear in figure Figure 2. All are
skewed toward the high end. The means vary from 6.43 to 8.28, and on six of the
items the modal response is 10. More revealing are the aggregated mean and
modal responses across all seven items: 7.41 and 10, respectively. On any
particular goal, in other words, most people say that it must be attained
completely or almost completely for a health plan to be acceptable. And most of
those same people also say that the other goals must be fully attained as well.[12]
Lacking information on the need for tradeoffs and given no motivation to make
responsible decisions, many people ask for more than policymakers can deliver.[13]
Although this behavior is not surprising, its existence underlines the
potential danger of interpreting citizens’ publicly expressed opinions in a
political environment devoid of information and incentive. In such an
environment, the natural and understandable tendency is to overlook, indeed not
even to think about, tradeoffs among goals.
In this environmental
circumstance, individual attributes play a large role. Despite the poor
performance overall, some citizens do better than others. The regression
analysis in table Table 1 shows that
the more highly educated and politically sophisticated demand less, overall,
than those who are less well educated and less politically sophisticated.[14]
With political ideology held constant, for example, the most educated and
sophisticated score about 1.35 less on the global mean than the least educated and
sophisticated. Considering that our scale ranges from one to ten and that most
people score near the high end of it, this difference is noteworthy. When the
environment provides little guidance, the individual’s level of cognitive
engagement strongly shapes decision-making performance.
The preceding findings raise several questions. Does the lack of
information about the necessity of tradeoffs explain people’s failure to make
them? Might people be capable of balancing the various goals but not feel
motivated to try? Does it take both incentive and information to induce
tradeoffs? Or, are citizens simply incapable of making tradeoffs under any
circumstances? We designed our next set of experimental manipulations to
determine whether improvements in the political environment can enhance citizen
performance, and, if so, what improvements are required.
Prior to being asked how essential each of the seven goal items
was to a national health carehealth-care
program, a randomly selected 20 percent of the sample was given information
about the need for tradeoffs. They were told that, “Making decisions about
governmental programs almost always requires giving up one thing to obtain
something else,” and then were asked if they thought elected officials
recognized this need. Note the general and once-removed nature of the
information. It says nothing about any specific tradeoffs or even the area of
health care, and merely indicates the need for
tradeoffs in designing any program.
The first column in table Table 2[T2]
reports the results of a regression analysis identical to that in table Table 2
<<AU, should both of these references to
tables in this sentence be to Table 2?>>(EDITOR—THE SECOND SHOULD BE TABLE 1) except
that it includes a dummy variable indicating whether or not respondents
received the general informational item about tradeoffs. The coefficient of
this dummy variable falls far short of statistical significance, evidence that
the informational cue provided in this experiment does not by itself enhance
decision-making performance. Simply stating that decisions about governmental
programs require giving up one thing to get something else does not reduce the
overall demand to achieve all of the goals. And as before, the more engaged
perform better.[15]
To invoke motivation in the survey context, we did the following.
A randomly chosen 25 percent were told that “people do best on these types of
[goal-demand] questions when they take time to think….Feel free to think awhile
before you answer.” Another 25 percent were told that people best answer these
questions when they “imagine themselves as a responsible public official.” Both
instructions were designed to increase cognitive processing and induce a
greater willingness to overcome the unpleasantness associated with compromising
some desired goals. We used the two different instruction sets to ascertain
whether the strength of the incentive was related to decision-making behavior.
We assume that the “responsible public official” instruction, with its request
that the respondent act as if actually in charge of the decision, is the
stronger of the two. The remainder of the sample did not receive a motivational
instruction.[16]
Note, finally, that neither of the motivational instructions
includes any information about the need to make tradeoffs. Respondents were
free to suppose, for example, that being responsible required making even
higher goal demands than they would have made otherwise. The purpose of the
instructions was solely to increase the seriousness with which respondents
approached their decision task.
The results in the second column of table Table 2
mirror those in the first column. Just as the coefficient of the general
information variable failed to reach statistical significance, so do the
coefficients of both motivational instructions. Asking people to think before
they answer or, more strongly, to put themselves in the position of a
responsible public official does not induce them to make tradeoffs. And individual
characteristics continue to be associated with our measure of tradeoffs.[17]
There are two plausible and very different explanations of this
insignificant relationship between the motivation instructions and our measure
of tradeoffs. The first is that the instructions simply don’t work. Since
respondents know they are doing no more than answering survey questions, they
could easily dismiss exhortations to take their decisions seriously. The second
is that the motivation instructions induce greater seriousness on the part of
respondents, but, in the absence of information about the need to make
tradeoffs, they fail to understand that serious decision making about health carehealth-care
policy includes making them. Which of these explanations does the evidence
support?
Column three in table Table 2 includes
three dummy variables: one designating whether a respondent received the
general information prime, another whether she received the “think”
instruction, and a third whether she received the “responsible official”
instruction. In addition, there are two interaction terms: general information x “think” and general information x “responsible official.” The
coefficients of these terms will reveal whether general information and
motivation induce increased tradeoffs when provided together.
None of the coefficients of the three dummy variables is statistically significant, nor is the coefficient of the information x “think” interaction term. In other words, when people are told that political decisions require tradeoffs, and are also given a modest incentive to take their tasks seriously, they perform no better than if they receive only the information or only the incentive, which is to say, no better than if they receive neither. One set of conditions, however, produces a significant effect: when given the same general information and the stronger motivation to act as a responsible public official, respondents reduce their overall demands.[18] In other words, general information and induced motivation are both necessary, and together they are sufficient, to increase the quality of citizen decision making. Once again, and as in all the analyses thus far, individual attributes emerge as important: the better educated and more politically sophisticated demand less, overall.[19]
Thus far we have found the following. In an environment largely
devoid of information and incentive, people generally do not make tradeoffs.
Providing very general information that tradeoffs are necessary does not itself
enhance the quality of decision making. Nor does motivating citizens to take
their decision task seriously. When both are provided, however, people reduce
their overall demands. In all of the environmental conditions we considered,
personal characteristics are associated with tradeoff behavior.
We now explore, in this final analysis, whether an exceptionally
informing environment, one that offers considerably more direct guidance than
citizens generally encounter in the political world, can improve decision
making. To this end, we designed a pair of questions to represent the task of
making tradeoffs under conditions of highly diagnostic information.
Specifically, respondents were told explicitly that there was a conflict and
what, precisely, that conflict was. In one case, respondents were told that
“experts say we cannot provide health coverage for everyone and at the same
time keep taxes down”; in the other, that “experts say we cannot require
businesses to pay for their employees’ health coverage and at the same time
avoid a loss of jobs.” They were then asked to choose one of four options:
achieve one goal (e.g., “provide health care for everyone”), achieve the other
(e.g., “keep taxes down”), compromise and achieve some of both, or—the
analytically critical option—“disagree with the experts and insist on achieving
both.”[20]
This kind of informational environment should considerably ease
the cognitive task of making tradeoffs. It provides the relevant information
about goal conflicts; offers a simplified choice among three clearly defined,
presumably feasible options; and by attribution to experts, gives respondents a
normative inducement to choose one of those options. Nevertheless, as in any
real-world context, the respondents still could reject those options and demand
achievement of both goals. We are interested primarily in the frequency and
determinants of this refuse-tradeoffs option, which we interpret as indicating
a fairly hard-core inability or unwillingness to make tradeoffs, even under
favorable conditions. To explore the effects of motivation in the presence of
highly diagnostic information, we repeated the same motivational instruction
sets used earlier.
For purposes of analysis, we combined responses to the two items
into a single measure, indicating how many times (0–2) the respondent rejected
tradeoffs. Only 16 percent rejected both tradeoffs; 27 percent rejected one or
the other; and 57 percent accepted tradeoffs both times. In an informing
environment, in other words, large majorities accept the idea that tradeoffs
are necessary and either give up all of one goal or some of both in order to
adopt a feasible option.[21]
What, then, about the
role of induced motivation and individual characteristics in such an informing
environment? Table 3[T3] reports the results of an ordered- probit
analysis in which the dependent variable has three categories (0, 1, 2)
corresponding to the number of times the respondent rejected the explicitly
stated tradeoff. The first interesting result is that, just like in the most
information-poor environment, induced motivation does not have a significant
effect. Although the coefficients of the weak and strong motivational
instructions are both in the right direction, neither achieves statistical
significance. In a political environment characterized by an abundance of
diagnostic information, people can make choices easily enough that inducing
motivation has no independent effect.
A second result is perhaps even more noteworthy with regard to the role of the environment. In every other environmental situation we considered, the more politically engaged were more likely to make tradeoffs. That is not the case here, where neither education nor political sophistication approaches statistical significance. In an environment that provides ample informational assistance, personal attributes are not associated with decision-making performance. People with less education and political sophistication make tradeoffs just as effectively as individuals with more. This is a rare finding in the study of public opinion, and it underlines how making the political game easy for citizens also levels the playing field. The less educated and less politically sophisticated are not simply fated to rendering poorer decisions.
[SH1]Concluding Comments
To say that citizens make political decisions in a political environment is unexceptionable. To find that the nature of the environment can affect the quality of those decisions is not. Our analysis indicates that these effects can be substantial. We found that the environment not only influences the aggregate level of citizen competence, but also determines the extent to which individual attributes such as education and political sophistication are associated with citizen performance. Most significantly, the availability of highly diagnostic information greatly reduces if not eliminates the advantage that normally accompanies education and political sophistication.
Beyond demonstrating these effects, we have proposed a revised and more elaborate account of what the environment consists of and how it operates. Like scholars before us, we have conceived the environment as a source of information. The environment, of course, provides vast amounts of information to citizens, more of it with each passing year. We have argued the need, however, to focus on the diagnostic value of that information, that is, the clarity and specificity of the guidance it provides for particular judgment tasks, and not on the volume.
In contrast with previous
literature, we have also documented the importance of a second role of the
environment: the motivational role of inducing citizens to take their tasks
seriously, invest effort, and bear the psychic burdens of responsible decision
making. The issue concerning motivation is what, if anything, the environment
can do to mitigate the logic of collective action and encourage responsible
citizenship in a mass democracy. Our study not only revealed the importance of
the environment’s inducing motivation but also the complex way in which the
effect of that motivation depends on the information that people receive. An
environment that tries to induce responsible decision making as a means to
improve the citizenry’s policy judgments will not achieve its goal if it fails
to provide some general information. Neither will provision of the information
alone suffice. Explicating the necessary combinations of motivation and
information for particular decision-making tasks goes far beyond the purview of
this paperarticle.
Nonetheless, we believe that such combinations exist and probably vary
considerably from one type of decision task to another.
Adopting an account of the political environment that includes both information and motivation not only points to new topics for research but also casts some existing findings into a new light. In interpreting the deliberative polls that they have conducted in the United States and abroad, for example, Fishkin and Luskin (Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell 1997; Luskin, Fishkin, and Plane 1999) focus primarily on the effects of exposing people to more and better information. But from our theoretical perspective, the entire process of bringing participants long distances to attend a meeting, putting them up in a hotel, giving them name-tags, and sending them into a group discussion is likely to have another effect—inducing an extraordinary level of motivation. Before they sit down at the conference table, participants will feel that they have a job to do, and one that they are supposed to take seriously. What Fishkin and colleagues have found, in our view, is that a combination of information and motivation changes attitudes, presumably for the better.
To put all these conclusions in context, however, we must recognize the limitations of this study. Our findings come from a set of experiments embedded in a survey and intended to simulate certain features of political environments. Because political scientists cannot manipulate political systems, we settled for offering citizens artificial environments—with different combinations of information and motivation—and observing how they respond. As with most survey experiments, the simulations cannot claim a high degree of realism, and inferences about real-world effects are necessarily tentative.
We have some confidence in the real-world relevance of our findings, however, because of the wide range of conditions that we explored. The mere combination of general information (a reminder about the existence of tradeoffs, with no reference to health care) along with a very modest motivational inducement (a request to act like a responsible official) produced significant improvement in tradeoff performance. With a task as difficult as making tradeoffs across a series of separately expressed goal demands, it is noteworthy that these treatments do anything. And it is hardly a stretch to suppose that some existing and potential real-world environments can match these levels of information and motivation. In contrast, the items providing authoritative, highly specific guidance were designed to approach or even exceed the most diagnostic information that any real-world environment could provide. If most respondents had still insisted on overlooking tradeoffs, it would have suggested something like incorrigible resistance to making them. But in fact the effects on performance were quite dramatic.
Of course, we do not expect politicians or even members of the media to present information and induce motivation for the purposes of optimizing citizen performance. It is not even clear how much structural change, directed to this end, is possible. Nevertheless, our findings offer a hopeful implication: that the much lamented limitations of citizen competence are less inherent in the capabilities and dispositions that individuals bring to politics and more a consequence of deficiencies in the political environment than scholars and practitioners often suppose. We are reminded of Key's (1966) remark likening the voice of the citizenry to an echo: the quality of the response reproduces what the environment provides. If so, most of the responsibility for improving democratic performance lies not with the citizens themselves but with the elites who shape, and have opportunity to alter, the political environment.
[MH]Manuscript
submitted June 21, 1999.
Final manuscript received October 13, 2000.
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[1] There is
a considerable literature, much of it published before 1985, on how well
ordinary citizens make policy tradeoffs. Relevant works include Buchanan and
Wagner (1977); Citrin (1979); Free and Cantril (1967); Ladd (1979); Modigliani
and Modigliani (1987); Mueller (1963); Sears and Citrin (1982); Welch (1985);
and Wilson (1983). This research, which generally concludes that people cannot
make tradeoffs, does little more than measure peoples’ attitudes. More recent
studies, far more limited in number (Hansen 1998 and Rasinski, Smith, and
Zuckerman 1994), ask people to make tradeoffs and then measure how well they
perform. Our research is in the second tradition.
[2]
Henceforth, we construe the political
environment roughly (and loosely) as students of heuristics have: as the
totality of politically relevant communication to which citizens are exposed.
It includes all the statements and information that the media, public
officials, interest groups, and other relevant actors provide with respect to a
given issue or policy debate. Nearly all of the information is mediated (Mutz
1998).
[3] Of course, countless scholars have considered how the
environment influences the direction of opinions and preferences.
[4] The notion of diagnostic information is central to
some literatures in expert systems, cognitive psychology, and artificial
intelligence (Beth-Maron and Fischhoff 1983<<AU, spelled Beyth-Maron
as in References or the spelling you give here?>>;
(EDITOR—SHOULD BE BEYTH) de Groot 1965; Feltovich, Ford, and Hoffman 1997;
Leake 1996; Simon and Chase 1973). The general idea is to present a situation
to someone. He or she is then asked what is wrong and how to remedy the
situation. The quality of the diagnosis and remedy depends on the ability to
solicit and use appropriate information. It also depends on one’s ability to
recognize what information is not particularly
relevant to the task (Minsky 1997). We are assuming, of course, that citizens
do not solicit information. Rather, we are interested in whether they
effectively use diagnostic information when the environment provides it to
them.
In the disciplines cited above,
disinterested observers typically agree on the diagnostic value of the
information. Not so in politics, where what is diagnostically valuable is often
controversial. Nonetheless, it would be counterproductive to assume that
objectivity is totally absent from the evaluation of public policy. The only
alternative would be to treat diagnostic value as a matter of whether the
information makes the individual confident in his or her decision (contrast
Popkin 1991 and Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991 with Kuklinski and Quirk
2000). Although useful for some purposes, this approach reduces the issue of
performance to one of self-satisfaction. To give an absurd example, an
astrological chart would provide diagnostic information in this sense for some
citizens.
We do not assume that value is found
only in substantive information. In some circumstances, endorsements or other
non-substantive cues can ease the decision tasks for citizens (see Lupia and
McCubbins 1998). However, at least as we are using the term, these sorts of cues,
while useful, do not normally provide diagnostic information.
[5] Of course, any conflict between two goals has a ceteris
paribus assumption. A government could provide the
best-possible national health care and not raise taxes if it were willing to weaken
national defense.
[6] The strong emphasis on cognition during the 1970s and
1980s lead psychologists and political scientists alike to abandon the study of
motivation, which had once been a central concept in social and cognitive
psychology (e.g., Festinger 1957). In the last decade or so, psychologists have
once again turned to the study of motivation (Kunda 1990; Sorrentino and
Higgins 1986). Motivation is also central to Lodge’s recent work in political
science (Lodge and Taber 2000; Lodge, Taber, and Galonsky 1999).
[7]
Another possibility is that citizens use on-line
processing (Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh 1989; Lodge, Steenbergen, and Brau 1995)
to deal with tradeoffs. As people learned how a certain policy affects various
goals, they would form evaluations of the policy. They would store only the
policy evaluations. When they received additional information about goal
effects, they would update the evaluation. But they would never have to compare
one goal explicitly with another, and they would not be able to retrieve the
goal effects or implicit goal comparisons that shaped their evaluation. Such a
process would enable citizens’ policy judgments to register their relative
concern about each of several goals. It would suffice to ensure competent judgment
if the political environment presented only feasible options. But as we have
already suggested, this is not likely to be the case.
[8] Such rhetoric does not mean that politicians fail to
make tradeoffs when it comes to final action. Political rhetoric and political
action need not be the same. However, this would seem only to emphasize the
importance of citizen awareness of the tradeoffs that inhere in a policy
decision.
[9] Hansen (1998) forces respondents to set priorities
between pairs of goals to learn whether they have the ability to rank
priorities consistently (that is, transitively) across several goals. He finds
that citizens perform quite well on this task.
[10] Specific details about the survey are reported in
Kuklinski
et al. , Quirk, Jerit, Schwieder, and Rich (2000).
The University of Illinois conducted the survey. The response rate was 47.5.
Forty- seven
percent of the respondents are men, 53 percent women. The mean education level
is consistent with that for the state population. Eleven percent of the sample
is African-American, compared to 15 percent in the state.
[11] We use the within-subject overall mean rating across
the seven goals as our dependent variable because the most direct empirical
expectation is that making tradeoffs will lower it, compared with demanding
full or nearly full achievement of all goals. Although a trade-off cognizant,
competent respondent in principle could accept equal sacrifices across several
goals (score all items at 5, for example), it is likely that making tradeoffs
will increase the within-subject dispersion across ratings. Therefore, we
duplicated all of the analyses reported in the text using standard deviations
instead of means as the performance measure. The results mirror those reported
in the text. Respondents who scored lower on the overall means also tended to
differentiate more fully. These analyses are available from the authors.
[12] The average correlation across the items is .31.
[13] The magnitudes of the means are a function of the
items we chose. These are the items that two academic social- policy
experts recommended to us as the major competing goals on health carehealth-care
reform.
[14] Our education variable consists of six categories:
less than high school, high school graduate, some college, college graduate,
some graduate education, and graduate degree. In accord with previous research,
we measured the level of political sophistication as the number of correct
answers the respondent gave to three informational questions: the number of Supreme
Court justices, the name of the Vice President, and the name of the Speaker of
the House.
[15] The coefficients of the information x
education and information x
political sophistication interaction terms were statistically insignificant.
[16] More correctly, another group of respondents was
asked to answer quickly, while a fourth group received no prime. We found no
difference in behavior between these two groups and thus combined them for
purposes of analysis. It is easy, we should note, to imagine stronger
manipulations than we have used here. Nonetheless, ours are as strong as those
typically used in psychology experiments (where subjects often are simply told
they later will have to justify their choices, for example).
[17] In line with what we found previously with respect to
information, there is no significant interaction effect between either of the
two motivation instructions and either education or political sophistication.
[18] The difference in the score on the dependent variable
between those who are given both instructions and those who are not is, on
average, .78.
[19] None of the coefficients of all the possible
interaction effects involving information, motivation, and personal attributes was were significant.
EDITOR—WAS IS CORRECT HERE—IT REFERS BACK TO NONE, WHICH IS SINGULAR
[20] Simplifying the decision task required us to change
the dependent variable. Although this change precludes strict comparison with
prior results, our primary objective was to determine whether greatly
simplifying the cognitive task can reduce individual-level differences in the
quality of decision making.
[21] Although it is not our primary concern, we also
considered whether liberals tended to opt for the more liberal goal (e.g.,
provide health coverage for everyone, require businesses to pay for coverage)
and conservatives for the more conservative one (e.g., keep taxes down, avoid
the loss of jobs). This indeed was the case, indicating further that people can
make competent decisions when they receive clearly stated information.