UCLA

In a political environment where information competes with “fake news” and partisanship dictates what is believed, voters must separate the two or be deceived. Though accurate information about politicians and policies is available, misperceptions persist, and increasing polarization in the government and the electorate exacerbate the reluctance to consume information that conflicts with existing attitudes. In this paper I identify the sources of information that affect people’s ability to correctly place Congressional candidates on the ideological spectrum and the factors that are associated with misperceptions of ideology. I draw on Bawn and Zaller’s notion of the electoral blind spot to illustrate the degree and skew of misperception in the electorate. I do this for major candidates, both incumbents and challengers, for the US House of Representatives and US Senate between 2006 and 2014. Results suggest that voters are generally unable to discern degrees of partisanship in their candidates. Voters tend to believe candidates are more moderate than they are in reality, and this effect is greater if a candidate is a voter’s co-partisan. Additionally, voters project their own ideological self-identification onto their candidates: The distance a voter considers themself to be from the ideological center influences, proportionally, how far the voter perceives candidates from either political party to be from the center. I examine the relationship between these effects and electoral outcomes to find limited evidence that voters practice proximity voting generally, with only small vote share penalties for candidates who are distant from the mean voter, but I find an effect of misperception of candidate ideology in the outcome of those elections in which better informed voters are less likely to vote for more extreme candidates. The heterogeneity of misperception and the projection of one’s own ideology onto candidates are previously unexplored, but not inconsistent effects on the conception of the electoral blind spot. In voter perceptions of moderation and the combined effect of misperception and candidate proximity, I find evidence consistent with the presence of an electoral blind spot as a set of policies or candidate positions over which the voter is indifferent.