Electoral Effects on the Distribution of Political Knowledge.

Surveys of the American electorate have repeatedly demonstrated pervasive low levels of political knowledge, though political psychology has countered the importance of this, demonstrating that voters are able to use cognitive heuristics to approximate well-informed decisions using relatively low levels of information. However, the vast majority of studies of voting heuristics examine the vote choice in isolation, looking only at a single vote decision at a time and typically looking at top-of-the ballot races, such as the Presidency. The reality of the American electoral system is far more complicated, requiring voters to learn about multiple contests simultaneously, some of them of lower status, limiting the attention they are willing or able to devote to any single contest or set of candidates. Even using heuristics, voters must possess a bare minimum of information, and as the number of contests increases the amount voters can be expected to learn and retain about any single contest should decline, at some point reaching an absolute minimal level. Using existing surveys of political knowledge, I examine the impact that multiple Federal offices on the ballot have upon voter’s knowledge of the candidates for those offices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]