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The concreteness of social knowledge and the quality of democratic choice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2021

Kai Ou Open the ORCID record for Kai Ou [Opens in a new window]  and
Scott A. Tyson
Kai Ou*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and xs/fs Experimental Social Science Research Group, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
Scott A. Tyson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and W. Allen Wallis Institute of Political Economy, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: kou@fsu.edu
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Abstract

Democracy relies on citizens who are politically knowledgeable and engaged. However, when a voter gains political knowledge regarding important issues, through television, town halls, or social media, she also learns that there are many other politically knowledgeable voters, highlighting the importance of social knowledge in political participation. Will a voter with concrete—as opposed to hypothetical—knowledge about other voters’ political knowledge have an increased incentive to participate? Or instead, will concrete social knowledge about other voters actually inhibit participation? In this article, we develop a novel experimental design that focuses on whether concrete knowledge about other voters’ political knowledge influences political participation. Our main result shows that concrete social knowledge decreases individual voters’ willingness to vote, and thereby reduces the probability democracy chooses the majority preferred alternative, i.e. the quality of democratic choice.

Keywords

Laboratory experimentcollective decision-makinghypothetical knowledgevoting games
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , July 2023 , pp. 483 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Ou and Tyson Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HWGLUJ
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