Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Politics:

Are voters apt to cast ballots just for sake of change?

Action Bias

Justin M. Bowen

Rep. Dina Titus, center, with Rep. Shelley Berkley and Sen. Harry Reid, are all seeking re-election in a year when voter anger is making news.

Sun Coverage

2010 General Election

Zip Code
Party Affilliation
Democrat — 60.9%
Republican — 19.1%
Independent — 15.2%
Other — 2.3%
Tea Party of Nevada — 0.8%
Green — 0.7%
Libertarian — 0.7%
Independent American Party — 0.3%
Who are you voting for in the U.S. Senate race?
Harry Reid — 70.7%
Sharron Angle — 26.9%
Scott Ashjian — 1.1%
Wil Stand — 0.5%
Tim Fasano — 0.3%
Jesse Holland — 0.3%
Jeffrey C. Reeves — 0.3%
Michael L. Haines — 0%
Who are you voting for in the Nevada gubernatorial race?
Rory Reid — 61.6%
Brian Sandoval — 32.3%
David Scott Curtis — 2.9%
Eugene "Gino" Disimone — 1.1%
Aaron Y. Honig — 0.8%
Floyd Fitzgibbons — 0.7%
Arthur Forest Lampitt Jr. — 0.6%
Who are you voting for in the U.S. House District 3 race?
Dina Titus — 66.2%
Joe Heck — 29.4%
Barry Michaels — 2.1%
Joseph P. Silvestri — 1.9%
Scott David Narter — 0.5%

This poll is closed, see Full Results »

Note: This is not a scientific poll. The results reflect only the opinions of those who chose to participate.

Imagine yourself stuck in a traffic jam, unable to see where it ends. Are you the type of person to frantically look for an alternate route, pull a U-turn and head out? Or do you figure it’s better to wait it out because that U-turn won’t get you anywhere?

The answer to that question could be key to Tuesday’s election results.

First, let’s examine an odd paradox:

Americans take a dim view of congressional Democrats, with 61 percent disapproving of them, but somewhat surprisingly they have an even stronger antipathy to congressional Republicans, with 67 percent disapproving, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Meanwhile, Gallup reports that although 48 percent of Americans blame President Barack Obama for the lackluster economy, 71 percent blame Republican policies for the bad economy, which makes some sense considering that the recession began in late 2007, more than a year before Obama took office.

And yet, Republicans, who are unpopular and blamed for the bad economy, are likely to win in a landslide Tuesday.

No one is tasting the mealy fruit of this paradoxical data more than Dina Titus, the Democrat representing Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District.

Titus was swept into office two years ago by voters upset with the collapsed local economy — 13 of the 20 ZIP codes with the most foreclosures in the country are in her district.

Just two years on, Titus has made a bit of a name for herself in Washington for hounding Obama for not doing enough about foreclosures, but voters still seem poised — she’s in a deadlocked race with former state Sen. Joe Heck — to toss her aside.

So what’s to explain why voters would choose Republicans despite their distaste for them?

Shankar Vedantam, a Washington Post reporter whose book “The Hidden Brain” examines all the ways the unconscious mind affects decision-making, recently hypothesized in the online magazine Slate that the answer to the conundrum lies in what psychologists call “action bias.”

The term refers to the urge to do something, anything, when things aren’t going well.

This could help explain Titus’ and the Democrats’ big victory in 2008, by which time the economy was in free fall. Although some commentators at the time attributed the election results to the country’s changing political attitudes or Obama’s near flawless campaign, maybe it was simpler than that: Americans thought things were going badly and wanted to do something, anything.

Vedantam writes: “When a company starts losing money, or a whole industry starts losing ground because of a new technology, most of us follow leaders who call for revolutionary change — even if no one really knows what change is needed.”

Action bias helps explain why people sell stock when it’s decreasing in value when they might be better served holding on to it, and rarely sell stock when it’s rising and they could lock in their profits. Or why people stuck in a traffic jam look for some alternate route — no matter how foolish — rather than wait it out.

Dave Damore, a UNLV political scientist, finds the idea plausible. He noted that close elections are decided on the margins, and that marginal voters often have little information. He praised the effectiveness of the Republicans’ campaign for their ability to play off voter anger about the state of the economy without being specific about what they would do once in office.

(Many Democrats, including Titus, have another problem: Their voters are sitting it out because they feel deflated by a lack of progress or are just lazy.)

Other political scientists who study voter behavior are skeptical of the action bias hypothesis.

Andrew Gelman, a Columbia University political scientist, noted another possibility: “Those 10 percent or so of voters who plan to vote Republican — even while thinking that the Democrats will do a better job — are not necessarily being so unreasonable.” They may desire a divided government, Gelman wrote on the political science blog The Monkey Cage.

Indeed, unlike 2008, this election gives voters an easy way to achieve a divided government because Obama isn’t on the ballot, so voters may think Republicans are worse than Democrats, but support them anyway to give them one house of Congress and put a check on Obama.

There’s another possible explanation for the confusing data: Tea Party activists are unhappy with Republicans in Congress because they say they are “sell outs,” but nonetheless they will vote Republican this year. This could be pushing up congressional Republican negatives, without decreasing Republican votes.

John Sides, a George Washington University political scientist, said in an e-mail that although data are confusing in the aggregate, most people’s views are fairly consistent: They blame one party for the country’s problems, and plan on voting for the other party.

“To take one example from an October YouGov poll that I have at my fingertips, 93 percent of those who approve of the job of congressional Democrats and have a preference in their district’s House race are planning to vote for the Democratic candidate. Similarly, 86 percent of those who approve of congressional Republicans plan to vote for the Republican candidate” — which suggests a fairly rational thought process.

Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University psychologist who studies voter behavior, said he’s also skeptical of the action bias hypothesis. To begin with, there’s plenty of research on human behavior suggesting the opposite of action bias — a status quo bias toward taking no action, Krosnick said.

Moreover, current psychological research suggests “Decision-making is occurring almost exclusively in the unconscious. When people try to explain their decisions, they’re mostly making up stories. All of it is in the unconscious.”

In other words, we don’t necessarily know why we make decisions, and the reasons we give for our decisions aren’t necessarily true, so it’s incredibly hard to discern why people vote the way they do. There’s a whole range of possibilities: policy preferences, but also feelings about the candidate’s character and family, feelings of well-being or stress, attitudes about race and gender, the effectiveness of the campaigns, and on and on.

“Any simple answer just doesn’t work,” Krosnick said.

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