What Voters Say Is Important Doesn’t Actually Affect Their Vote

Evidence of revealed preferences is much more accurate than stated preferences.

Over and over again this election season, you are going to see polls that try to assess which issues people think are important. Sometimes pollsters ask an open-ended question so respondents can state their priorities in their own words. Sometimes pollsters list issues and ask people how important each one is. Occasionally, pollsters will try to make respondents rank issues.

All of these exercises have their uses. But what are they not useful for? Identifying the factors that actually matter to voters at the ballot box.

That’s the conclusion of a 2020 paper, “More Important, but for What Exactly? The Insignificant Role of Subjective Issue Importance in Vote Decisions,” by political scientists Thomas Leeper and Joshua Robison. 

. . .

These findings fit with a long vein of research showing that people are not good at articulating the reasons for their choices. So they may say – and honestly feel! – that an issue is important. But when they say that, they are not revealing that this issue will affect how they vote. The same problem emerges even when pollsters directly ask people whether something would change their vote.

Via John Sides via Fully Myenlinated.

Moderate voters are particularly indifferent to the issues espoused by political candidates:

Models of voting behavior typically specify that all voters employ identical criteria to evaluate candidates. We argue that moderate voters weigh candidates’ policy/ideological positions far less than non-moderate voters, and we report analyses of survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study that substantiate these arguments. Across a wide range of models and measurement strategies, we find consistent evidence that liberal and conservative voters are substantially more responsive to candidate ideology than more centrist voters. Simply put, moderate voters appear qualitatively different from liberals and conservatives, a finding that has important implications for candidate strategies and for political representation.

James Adams, et al., "Do Moderate Voters Weigh Candidates’ Ideologies? Voters’ Decision Rules in the 2010 Congressional Elections" 29 Political Behavior 205-117 (August 31, 2016, issue date March 2017). 

The study also sets the bar for "political sophistication" rather low:

Sophistication is measured using a battery of eight political knowledge questions relating to the party in control of state and federal institutions (U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, state senate, and state lower house) and name recognition of state and federal representatives (U.S. Senators, governor, and U.S. House Representative). Respondents who answered all eight questions correctly are classified as politically sophisticated.