Political misinformation, voter turnout and electoral reform

Part II: the importance of civic literacy, PR electoral systems and other factors in making democracy work -- especially during this age of misinformation

[DemocracySOS welcomes back Canadian political scientist Henry Milner in Part II discussing his research about “civic literacy” and its impact on political participation and democracy (see Part I here). In Part II, Professor Milner factors in the recent impact of rampant political misinformation and misinformed voters.

Henry is a Research Fellow at Chair in Electoral Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. He is author of eleven books, including his recent political memoir Participant Observer: An Unconventional Life In Politics and Academia, a “political autobiography of a generation,” in which he tells about his eventful life as an academic on several continents, a party leader in Quebec, and a student and community activist in the 1960s and 70s after being born in a bunker in American-occupied Germany.

Henry is also co-publisher of “Inroads: the Canadian Journal of Opinion,” a semi-annual publication founded in 1992 which covers emerging issues from a Canadian perspective. Inroads provides extensive coverage of Aboriginal issues, federalism, immigration, and Quebec secessionism, with contributors scanning Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia through a Canadian lens. Subscription to the electronic edition is free. Contact Henry at Inroadsjournal@gmail.com]

In a previous article, “The importance of ‘civic literacy’ to making democracy work,” I summarized my contribution to the literature on democratic political participation. In that article I compared levels of political knowledge in OECD countries – what I termed civic literacy – to show that, in the past, people who were more politically knowledgeable participated more in the democratic process. This positive relationship between political knowledge and voter turnout was reproduced across many different nations.

The United States was at or near the bottom in levels of political knowledge, with the Scandinavian and European countries at the top, a disparity reflected in voter turnout rates. It turns out that “civically literate” individuals have been more likely to vote and otherwise take part in politics. A key factor was the importance that countries placed on civic and adult education. Moreover, institutional differences, notably the electoral systems used in these countries, mattered.

In proportional representation electoral methods, voters tended to hear from a range of political parties which articulated issues and ideologies in a way that engendered turnout and helped voters to have sufficient knowledge of the issues of the day so that they could make sense of their political worlds.

Whereas under a winner-take-all/first-past-the-post method, voters were usually limited to choosing from two viable political parties with low competition in highly partisan single-seat districts, which in turn dumbed down politics into simplistic sound bites and either/or binary choices. Such binary politics can make it difficult for everyday voters to understand the full political consequences of casting their votes, and that dynamic tended to decrease turnout among uninformed voters. I detailed these finding in my book Civic Literacy: How Informed Citizens Make Democracy Work.

Viral misinformation enters the game

Since then, another dimension has emerged in the United States in particular that further complicates this relationship. Surveys of voters’ political knowledge in recent elections have shown that those less informed include a growing group that are not politically uninformed but rather misinformed. They actually believe they are informed, but it turns out they are not. However, unlike the uninformed, this does not reduce their likelihood to vote, quite the opposite.

Beyond the simple fact that they protect us from aspiring autocrats, we need elections so that those who govern make choices that reflect our goals and needs. For that to be possible, the electoral process should maximize the possibility of voters’ choices among the parties and candidates being based on their achievements — or lack of — in office, taking into account their relative competence and honesty.

A pure two-party system, which is found only in the United States among longstanding democracies, constrains these choices (the US has several minor parties, but due to the winner-take-all electoral system none of them are politically viable). Where there are more than two parties in a system of proportional representation, a voter with a preference for a given party’s program can vote for another party if the preferred party deviates significantly from that program when in office, but without his or her vote contributing to handing power over to their “greater evil” rival.

In theory, these outcomes are independent of the proportion of voters who actually participate. Indeed, other things being equal, better outcomes are more likely to be attained with a low turnout, i.e. of those most interested in the outcome. However other things are not equal since the preferences of the most interested are not likely to be representative of those of the population as a whole. Moreover, low turnout can undermine the legitimacy of the process, and thus the effectiveness of those elected through it. (One can raise turnout through compulsory voting, but the evidence from countries using compulsory voting, like Australia, is that those who vote only to avoid paying a fine make no additional effort to inform themselves.) 

The legitimacy of the process rests on the outcome being seen as reflecting the actual choices of the voters. While in the United States there have long been criticisms based on cases of unfairness, with losers in the popular vote for president turned into winners through the electoral college, it was only in 2020 that the loser refused to accept the outcome of the presidential election. At last count, 40 percent of Americans believe Trump’s lie that the election was “stolen” from him.

Here we see a manifestation of the most blatant expression of political misinformation. We can take this number as an approximation of the proportion of American voters who can be classified as misinformed. This reality forces us back to where my previous article left off, to reconsider our understanding of the relationship between information, voter choice, voter participation and election outcomes in the United States.

Many American know less than they realize

Ian Anson, an associate professor of political science at the University of Maryland, wrote a useful article entitled “Many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do. It’s bad for democracy that they’re so often wrong.”  In it he reports on his research in which he surveyed over 1200 people and found that 70 percent of respondents were overconfident about their knowledge of politics, and often wrong in their beliefs. The author investigated “what would happen when politically overconfident people found out they were mistaken about political facts.”

Professor Ansom writes, “First, I asked respondents a series of basic questions about American politics. This quiz included topics like which party controls the House of Representatives – and who the current Secretary of Energy is – Jennifer Granholm. Then, I asked them how well they thought they did on the quiz.”

It turned out that many respondents who believed they are the most knowledgeable were actually among those who scored the worst. “Much akin to the results of a famous study by Dunning and Kruger,” says Ansom,“the poorest performers did not generally realize that they lagged behind their peers…Their attitudes toward falsehoods remained inflexible, likely because they – wrongly – considered themselves political experts.”

While the study did not control for education, other research shows that it is the less educated Americans that are most likely to have — and hold on to, despite contrary evidence — false political information. In this context we should note that recent US data, reported on in May 2020, points to a major shift in the composition of supporters of the two parties (see “The Demographic Profiles of Democrats and Republicans” by Peter Hanson and Yuejun Chen).

When it comes to income, Republicans continue to be better off on average than Democrats. (nearly 29 percent of those who identify as Democrats have incomes under $25,000, compared to 13 percent of Republicans. In addition, 26 percent of Republicans have incomes above $100,000, compared to just under 20 percent of Democrats.)  But the opposite is now the case with regard to education, with 48 percent of Republicans with a high school education or less, compared to 35 percent of Democrats, and 36 percent of Democrats have a bachelor’s degree or above, compared to 28 percent of Republicans.

These characteristic differences between Democrats and Republicans speak volumes about the current moment, in which less educated Americans are the likeliest to hang on to false political information, including deceptions about a stolen presidential election. Yet unlike in the past, when the least-informed had lower participation rates, that is no longer the case.

Another related factor is geography. A June 2022 paper by Michael Barber and John B. Holbein poured through 400 million voting records and found “profound racial and geographic disparities in voter turnout.” Barber and Holbein report that Democrats, racial minorities and youth are now significantly more likely to live in lower turnout communities — which they term turnout deserts — compared to Republicans. “Turnout deserts are especially pernicious,” wrote the authors, “given that they are self-reinforcing—bolstered by the social dynamics that fundamentally shape citizens’ voting patterns.”

Taken together, these criss-crossing developments regarding less-educated, misinformed voters and voter turnout mean that we can no longer count on the better informed being overrepresented among voters. The connection of these patterns to Trumpism is undeniable.

Proportional representation would broaden participation and representation

As the American Political Science Association noted In its 2019 call for papers, “no recent political development has been more striking than the rise to power of populist movements around the globe, whose main unifying trait is their claim to champion ’the people’ against entrenched selfish ’elites.’ They include anti-immigrant, anti-globalization, ardently nationalist parties such as Fidesz in Hungary; the Law and Justice Party in Poland; and the Trump Republicans in the United States.”

It is remarkable that only the United States among longstanding democracies has a populist party in a position to govern comparable to those in power in Hungary and Poland. A re-nominated Donald Trump could conceivably again be elected president in 2024, benefiting, as he did in 2016, from the overrepresentation of small Republican states in the electoral college. Here, institutions matter. If the United States had a more proportional electoral system, or, at the very least, institutional changes that would shrink barriers to entry by third parties, conservative Never-Trumpers would have somewhere to go.

In the red states, Democrats cannot hope to win but a small number of congressional districts. As long as the determination is based on winner-take-all elections, in those states there is no value in investing resources in senate or presidential races. This, of course, would not be the case if a proportional system were in place. If Democrats in a red state could expect to have their votes count toward electing a congressional delegation and electing a president, they would have every incentive to campaign statewide and, in so doing, counter political misinformation — another, and not the least advantage, of making electoral systems more proportional.

Henry Milner