The Role of the Information Environment

in Partisan Voting
Erik Peterson, Dartmouth College

Voters are often highly dependent on partisanship to structure their preferences toward political candidates and policy
proposals. What conditions enable partisan cues to “dominate” public opinion? Here I theorize that variation in voters’
reliance on partisanship results, in part, from the opportunities their environment provides to learn about politics. A
conjoint experiment and an observational study of voting in congressional elections both support the expectation that
more detailed information environments reduce the role of partisanship in candidate choice. These findings clarify
previously unexplained cross-study variation in party cue effects. They also challenge competing claims that partisan
cues inhibit responsiveness to such a degree that voters fail to use other information or that high-information envi-
ronments increase voter reliance on partisanship.

P artisans in the electorate overwhelmingly vote for co-

partisan candidates (Bartels 2000; Campbell et al. 1960;
Rahn 1993) and frequently adopt the issue positions ad-
vocated by their elite copartisans (Cohen 2003; Druckman,
Peterson, and Slothuus 2013; Zaller 1992). While partisan-
ship is often prominent in voter decision making, there is dis-
agreement about the conditions that enable partisan cues to
“dominate” public opinion. In one set of accounts this domi-
nance results from a fundamental tendency for voters to ig-
nore or counterargue with information that would lead them
to defect from their party (Bolsen, Druckman, and Cook 2014).
Other perspectives suggest this dominance is more circum-
stantial. The public may rely heavily on partisanship, but this
often stems from the absence of other pieces of choice-specific
information (Bullock 2011) or the complex nature of some
political decisions (Lau and Redlawsk 2006).
I test between these perspectives by focusing on the inter-
action between voters’ use of partisanship and the amount of
information, beyond party labels, available to them when eval-
uating politicians. How does the information environment af-
fect the degree to which voters rely on partisan cues? Theories
of partisan cue taking present starkly different predictions about
how the amount of information available to a voter will in-
teract with their use of partisanship. If partisan cues largely
serve as substitutes for information that is costly to obtain,
additional information should reduce the role of partisanship
as voters are provided with more relevant attributes with
which to assess politicians (Bullock 2011; Downs 1957). How-
ever, this runs counter to other predictions. First, prior stud-
ies of partisan cue taking identify a number of mechanisms
through which partisan resistance limits the degree to which
information can lead voters to oppose candidates sharing their
party label (Bolsen et al. 2014; Campbell et al. 1960; Rahn 1993;
Slothuus and De Vreese 2010). Second, accounts in political
psychology predict that additional information provision will
increase voters’ reliance on partisanship by forcing them to use
party labels to cope with information overload (Lau and Red-
lawsk 2006, 242–46; Riggle 1992).
Extending research on the role of information environ-
ments in voter decision making (Delli Carpini, Keeter, and
Kennamer 1994; Jerit, Barabas, and Bolsen 2006; Kuklinski
et al. 2001), I examine how the amount of candidate-specific
information available to voters affects partisan voting in con-
gressional elections. The research designs employed here di-

Erik Peterson (erik.j.peterson@dartmouth.edu) is a postdoctoral research associate in Dartmouth College’s Program in Quantitative Social Science, Hanover,
NH 03755.
This project was approved by Stanford University’s Institutional Review Board. This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foun-
dation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant DGE-114747. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are
those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Data and supporting materials necessary to reproduce the
numerical results in the paper are available in the JOP Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/jop). An online appendix with supplementary material
is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/692740.

The Journal of Politics, volume 79, number 4. Published online August 16, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/692740
q 2017 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved. 0022-3816/2017/7904-006$10.00 1191
1192 / Role of Information Environment in Partisan Voting Erik Peterson
rectly manipulate the amount of available information at several
points on the path from an information-poor to an information-
rich environment. This is accomplished with a doubly random-
ized conjoint experiment that varies both the amount and type
of information respondents encounter about a pair of candi-
dates to examine partisan voting in different settings (see also
Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto 2015). To assess the
generalizability of these findings to a campaign environment,
where pressure to vote the party line may be particularly pro-
nounced (e.g., Gelman and King 1993; Huddy, Mason, and
Aaroe 2015; Iyengar, Mason, and Aaroe 2012) and voters can
choose to avoid encountering political information (Prior 2007),
these experimental results are paired with an observational
study leveraging misalignment between newspaper markets
and political constituencies to examine differences in partisan
voting based on the quality of the media environment for con-
gressional elections.
In both settings, I find that additional candidate-specific
information reduces partisan voting. Absent detailed candi-
date information, voters use partisanship to fill in unknowns.
They rely on partisanship to a reduced, although still sub-
stantial, extent when provided with more information. These
studies also fail to offer evidence of increased dependence
on cues in more detailed environments. Voters in areas with
extensive media coverage of congressional elections or who
are provided with lengthy candidate profiles continue to de-
crease their reliance on partisanship. In tandem, these find-
ings challenge competing claims that partisan cues inhibit
responsiveness to such a degree that voters fail to use other
information or that partisan cues grow more effective in high-
information environments. They also clarify previously unex-
plained cross-study variation in party cue effects.
PARTISANSHIP AND VOTER DECISION MAKING
Voters’ partisan attachments affect their evaluations of po-
litical candidates (e.g., Bartels 2000; Rahn 1993), their atti-
tudes toward policies (Zaller 1992) and even intrude on their
perceptions of the economy (Bartels 2002; but see Bullock et al.
2015). While a wealth of evidence establishes the importance
of partisanship, a pat conclusion that it “matters” ignores sub-
stantial variation in the extent to which voters make use of
these attachments. For all the evidence supporting the domi-
nance of partisanship in voter decision making, in a number
of settings partisan cues exert a more limited effect on opin-
ion (Bullock 2011; Nicholson 2011) and the public continues
to respond to other information even when partisan cues are
available (Arceneaux 2008; Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014;
Sniderman and Stiglitz 2012). Considering the literature as a
whole, there is substantial and unexplained cross-study var-
iation in the effect of partisanship on voter preferences that
“defeats most attempts to generalize” (Bullock 2011, 509; see
also Druckman 2014, 477).
Individual differences offer one explanation for this vari-
ation. Voters with a dispositional need for cognition (Bullock
2011; but see Kam 2005), conflicted partisan identities (La-
vine, Johnston, and Steenbergen 2012), or who lack an under-
standing of party brands (Sniderman and Stiglitz 2012) all
depend less on party labels. Features of the political environ-
ment also contribute. Klar (2014) shows that discussions with
out-partisans reduce voters’ reliance on partisanship. Druck-
man et al. (2013) and Levendusky (2010) identify aspects of elite
polarization that increase the tendency for voters to follow party
labels, and Iyengar et al. (2012) discuss the role of campaigns
in generating antipathy for out-partisans.
While these efforts offer broad outlines for differences in
the importance of partisanship, they fail to explain substantial
residual variation in voters’ use of partisanship. In reviewing
a relatively homogenous set of experimental studies on par-
tisan cues—which do not vary on any of the aforementioned
environmental features—Bullock (2011) observes substantial
differences in the extent to which partisan cues affect opin-
ions toward political candidates and policy proposals. A com-
mon, but untested, explanation attributes differences in party
cue effects to aspects of the information environment in which
individuals evaluate candidates or policies. For example, Schaf-
fner and Streb (2002) identify large party cue effects and ref-
erence the low-information nature of the elections they ex-
amine to explain these results (see also Meredith and Grissom
2010). Bullock (2011) finds small party cue effects and attri-
butes them to the detailed policy descriptions in which the cues
were embedded. While these explanations make intuitive sense,
credible alternative theories about the way information envi-
ronments interact with voters’ use of partisanship, reviewed
in the next section, propose the opposite pattern or predict no
relationship between the information environment and cue use.
Moreover, these contrasting expectations have not been as-
sessed in a cohesive design that directly manipulates the amount
of information available to voters.
INFORMATION ENVIRONMENTS
AND PARTISAN VOTING
In this study the information environment refers to the
amount of detail, beyond party labels, available to voters when
they evaluate political candidates. This information typically
stems from media sources providing election coverage. Infor-
mation environments contribute to political knowledge (Delli
Carpini and Keeter 1996, 106–16; Luskin 1990), and the op-
portunities for political learning created by an informative

environment can increase knowledge even for those with low
degrees of political sophistication (Jerit et al. 2006) or who are
uninterested in politics (Downs 1957, 223; Hayes and Lawless
2015). While research links information-rich environments
to increased political participation (Schulhofer-Wohl and Gar-
rido 2013), political knowledge (Arnold 2004, Hayes and Law-
less 2015), and even improved voter decision making on par-
ticular policy issues (Kuklinski et al. 2001), less attention has
been paid to how the information environment affects can-
didate preferences.1
Despite limited empirical examination, connections be-
tween the information environment and voters’ reliance on
party labels underpin many theories of partisanship and
cue taking. In one portrayal the importance of party labels
stems from difficulties in obtaining other types of informa-
tion, at least for those uninterested in investing substantial
time pursuing political news (Downs 1957). This means vot-
ers frequently decide between candidates based on limited
amounts of political information (Converse 1964; Delli Car-
pini and Keeter 1996). Absent detailed knowledge of partic-
ular candidates, voters use shortcuts to form candidate pref-
erences (Popkin 1991; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991).
While voters turn to a variety of heuristics to evaluate can-
didates in low-information environments (e.g., Cutler 2002;
Matson and Fine 2006; McDermott 2005; Popkin 1991), can-
didate partisanship serves as the “preeminent electoral cue”
(Basinger and Lavine 2005, 171). Given elite efforts to culti-
vate a consistent party brand (Cox and McCubbins 2005),
knowledge of a candidate’s partisanship offers insight into
their issue positions (Grynaviski 2010; Snyder and Ting 2002)
and priorities (Petrocik 1996). This allows partisan cues to
substitute for more detailed candidate information. Consis-
tent with this claim, partisan cues help individuals articulate
candidate choices (Garlick 2015; Schaffner and Streb 2002) and
exert a large effect on vote choice (Meredith and Grissom 2010;
Schaffner, Streb, and Wright 2001).
Partisan cues in low- and moderate-
information environments
Although a variety of theoretical perspectives can accommo-
date large party cue effects in a low-information environment,
expectations differ for how additional information affects the
role of partisanship. One hypothesis is that the availability of
additional information will reduce partisan cue use. For ex-
1. One exception is Snyder and Strömberg (2010, 383–87), which shows
that incumbency is more relevant to voters in areas with higher levels of
candidate-specific media coverage. However, given findings in which party
and incumbency are not substitutes in candidate evaluation, this does not
necessarily imply that more detailed information environments also reduce
partisan voting (e.g., Ansolabehere and Snyder 2002, 328).
Volume 79 Number 4 October 2017 / 1193
ample, in Downs’s (1957) conception cues are so powerful
largely because individuals refuse to bear the cost of search-
ing out additional information on their own. If directly pro-
vided with more detail, however, there is nothing to stop in-
dividuals from making use of other attributes to evaluate
candidates (see also Bullock 2011, 490; Green, Palmquist, and
Schickler 2002, chap. 5; Popkin 1991).
This is relevant because additional information is likely
to introduce new considerations into candidate evaluation
that would not otherwise be present if voters focused only
on candidate partisanship. While partisan cues signal many
things, they are still an imperfect shortcut (Kuklinski and
Quirk 2000). Some relevant information is not clearly linked to
party reputations (e.g., a candidate’s educational background).
Also, cues only serve as a reliable proxy for candidate issue
positions when voters are aware of party reputations and can-
didates take stereotypical stances (Delli Carpini and Keeter
1996; Hutchings 2003; Snyder and Ting 2002). A richer infor-
mation environment allows individuals to assess candidate is-
sue positions directly and incorporate details that are not part
of party reputations into their decisions, both points which
support the expectation that more detailed information envi-
ronments should reduce the role of partisanship in candidate
evaluation.
This intuitive expectation contrasts with research in which
partisan cues are not only a shortcut but also alter the way
individuals use other pieces of information they encounter.
Group attachment perspectives on partisanship focus on the
way partisan cues introduce a “perceptual lens” (e.g., Bartels
2002; Campbell et al. 1960) to evaluations and generate par-
tisan motivated reasoning (Bolsen et al. 2014; Druckman et al.
2013), leading voters to asses information so as to be as fa-
vorable as possible to their partisan attachments. Absent strong
accuracy incentives, this motivated reasoning model describes
the default type of political information processing in which
individuals engage (Bolsen et al. 2014; Bullock et al. 2015). This
suggests a muted effect for additional content as cues will lead
voters to discount unfavorable (favorable) information they
receive about copartisan (out-partisan) candidates (e.g., Jerit
and Barabas 2012; Slothuus and De Vreese 2010).
Dual-process theories of partisan cue taking produce sim-
ilar expectations through a different mechanism. Here parti-
san cues reduce the costs of processing political information
(Eagly and Chaiken 1993; Petty and Cacioppo 1986). If the ad-
ditional information provided to respondents is difficult to as-
sess or they approach the candidate evaluation task with lim-
ited motivation to process these details, then voters should
ignore additional information and continue to use partisan cues
as the primary determinant of their evaluation when provided
with more detailed candidate profiles (e.g., Rahn 1993).
1194 / Role of Information Environment in Partisan Voting Erik Peterson
Partisan cues in high-information environments
A final hypothesis concerns the role of partisan cues in par-
ticularly rich information environments. While voters may
process modest amounts of information, in some campaign
settings they may become overwhelmed by the amount of po-
litical content they encounter (Barton 2015; Lau and Redlawsk
2006; Rahn, Aldrich, and Borgida 1994; Riggle 1992; Simon
1985). Even if cue effects decline in the presence of moderate
amounts of information, theories drawn from the social psy-
chology literature on stereotypes and task complexity predict
that partisan cues may become even more influential in en-
vironments where citizens are exposed to a great deal of in-
formation. As Lau and Redlawsk (2001, 955) write, “because
heuristics provide cognitive efficiency, they should be relied
upon more heavily in more cognitively complex situations.”
When a decision is particularly difficult, in this case because
of the amount of detail provided to voters and the array of po-
tential dimensions on which to compare politicians, voters may
turn to cues to simplify the process of generating a summary
judgment (Bodenhausen and Lichentstein 1987; Malhotra 1982)
and to avoid systematic information processing under con-
ditions of high cognitive load (e.g., Tormala and Petty 2004,
430; see also Abelson and Levi 1985).
In politics, partisanship offers a prominent and widely
available cue for voters to simplify decision making when
faced with complexity. For instance, the revival of research
on partisan selective exposure in news consumption is cred-
ited, in part, to an evolving media environment that has be-
come capable of delivering much higher volumes of political
information, necessitating the use of partisan cues by news
consumers to sort through this overwhelming information
flow (Iyengar and Hahn 2009, 34). Moving to candidate eval-
uation, several studies find that voters become increasingly
reliant on partisanship in more complex information envi-
ronments. Riggle (1992) tasks survey respondents to evaluate
either a single candidate or make comparative assessments of
multiple politicians. In the complex comparative setting, re-
spondents depend more on partisanship to form evaluations.
Lau and Redlawsk (2001, 960) compare the candidate infor-
mation that voters search for on static versus dynamic infor-
mation boards. They identify greater use of partisan cues in
the more complex dynamic environments. In the present case,
support for this theory would indicate an increased reliance
on partisan cues in high-information conditions.
STUDY 1: PARTISAN CUE EFFECTS
IN A CONJOINT EXPERIMENT
I first examine the effect of information volume on parti-
san voting using a conjoint survey experiment conducted on
1,057 partisan respondents recruited from a panel maintained
by Survey Sampling International (SSI).2 Each respondent saw
three pairs of candidate profiles. In the experiment respon-
dents received information about a pair of congressional can-
didates, one Republican and one Democrat, and selected which
one of the two candidates they would prefer to see in Con-
gress. The two candidates were always from opposing polit-
ical parties, simulating a general election matchup, and can-
didate partisanship was always the first feature in the profile.
Holding the placement of partisanship constant across profiles
ensures that any change in the use of partisanship in longer
profiles only results from the availability of other pieces of in-
formation and not due to changes in the probability candidate
partisanship received a prominent profile position.3 Lending
the exercise some external validity, these profiles closely re-
semble the voter guides distributed by many media organiza-
tions during political campaigns (e.g., Boudreau, Elmendorf,
and MacKenzie 2015; Mummolo and Peterson 2016).
The conjoint design randomly assigned several other as-
pects of the candidate profiles. First, the amount of infor-
mation that respondents received about the candidates varied
across profile pairs. While the profiles always included can-
didate partisanship, they also featured one, three, five, seven,
or nine additional pieces of candidate information.4 Second,
the type of information respondents encountered varied. For
example, among those receiving one additional piece of in-
formation, some respondents learned the candidates’ positions
concerning spending on government services while others re-
ceived information about their educational backgrounds.5 There
were nine types of candidate information in total, so respon-
dents in the highest information condition all received the same
information types, although the order in which this was pre-
sented in the profile was randomized. Third, the values taken
by these information attributes varied independently for each
candidate. This means a candidate’s position on government
spending was unrelated to other aspects of their profile or the
government spending stance taken by the other candidate.6
2. Since the study examines partisan cues, only partisans were sam-
pled. Subjects were quota sampled from SSI to match benchmarks among
partisans in the 2012 CCES. See appendix A for further details.
3. This would be the case if the position of candidate partisanship
varied at the same time the number of candidate attributes in the profile
also changed.
4. Within each profile pair, respondents received the same amount of
information for each candidate.
5. These types of information were drawn from earlier candidate
conjoint experiments (Hainmueller et al. 2014, 17) and the types of can-
didate information commonly provided in voter guides. The order of these
other pieces of information randomly varied across candidate profile pairs.
6. There were no restrictions imposed on candidate profile combi-
nations although there were unequal weights assigned to some attribute
levels. See appendix A for further description.

Figure 1. Example conjoint profiles in different information conditions. A, One additional piece of candidate information. B, Nine additional pieces of
candidate information.
Figure 1 displays example profiles from the lowest and
highest information conditions.7 In the left panel the profile
contained one additional piece of information beyond can-
didate partisanship, in this case information about the edu-
cational background of the candidates, which took the same
value (“BA from state university”) for the candidate pair. The
right panel shows an example from the highest information
condition in which respondents received details about the can-
didate pair on nine different pieces of information beyond
partisanship. In this pairing respondents were informed about
the stance of the candidates on major social (abortion) and eco-
nomic (government spending) issues, as well as demographic
and biographical details such as the candidate’s race, gender
and profession.
Candidate partisanship is present in all conditions, which
enables a comparison of the role of partisanship in candidate
preferences across drastically different information environ-
ments. As the actual content of this other information was also
randomly assigned, both in terms of the attributes available
to evaluate a candidate and the specific attribute values, this
design allows an examination of the effects of information vol-
ume on partisan voting in a way that generalizes beyond one
particular candidate profile. Finally, the profiles in the high-
information conditions contained an extensive amount of can-
didate information. As evidenced by the additional time re-
spondents took responding to these longer profiles, this placed
more extensive information processing demands on respon-
dents (see app. A for a description of this manipulation check;
7. Examples from all information conditions can be found in ap-
pendix A.
Volume 79 Number 4 October 2017 / 1195
apps. A, B available online). This enables a test of expectations
that high volumes of candidate information will overload re-
spondents’ ability to effortfully process each individual piece
and increase their use of heuristic evaluations based on par-
tisan cues (Hainmueller, Hopkins, and Yamamoto 2014, 25;
Malhotra 1982).
Analyzing the conjoint experiment
In examining the role of copartisanship in voting in the ex-
periment, I estimate regression models of the following form.
Following the notation used in Hainmueller et al. (2014), i
indexes individuals, k indexes the three pairs of profiles each
individual received, and j indexes the two alternatives present
within a choice task:
Pref er Candidateijk p b0 1 b1 Copartisanijk
1 b2 Inf ormation Amountijk
1 b3 Copartisanijk
#Inf ormation Amountijk 1 ϵijk :
The combination of multiple profiles and choice tasks
for each respondent means that 6,216 profile evaluations are
available for analysis. The outcome is an indicator variable for
whether the respondent preferred that candidate. Copartisan
is an indicator variable for whether the candidate shared a
respondent’s partisanship. Information Amount takes the value
of the number of other pieces of information included in the
candidate profile. The interaction between these terms enables
an examination of changes in the role of copartisanship as re-
spondents received different amounts of candidate informa-
tion. While some subsequent analyses control for the partic-
1196 / Role of Information Environment in Partisan Voting Erik Peterson
Figure 2. Effect of copartisanship on candidate support. Data from a conjoint
survey experiment conducted on SSI (n p 1,059). Each respondent evaluated
three profile pairs. Figure shows the effect of copartisanship on vote choice
at varying levels of information. Estimates obtained from an interaction model
in which copartisanship is interacted with a separate dummy variable for each
information level. The 95% confidence intervals were obtained from robust
standard errors, clustered by respondent. The gray line indicates the marginal
effect of copartisanship from an interaction model where information amount
is coded as a continuous variable.
ular attributes available to evaluate a candidate and the values
these attributes took, these other aspects of the profiles were
randomly assigned and including them does not appreciably
change estimates of the main coefficients of interest.
Figure 2 displays the marginal effect of copartisanship on
vote choice, indicating the extent to which respondents pre-
ferred copartisan candidates at these different information lev-
els. To avoid imposing a functional form on the relationship
between information and partisan voting, particularly because
some theories generate expectations of nonlinearities, the in-
formation amount is entered into the regression as a series of
separate indicator variables for each level.8
As expected, partisanship exerts a powerful effect on vote
choice. When provided with only one other piece of infor-
mation, copartisanship increased the probability that a re-
spondent preferred a candidate by 70 percentage points (95%
confidence interval [64, 76]). However, this effect declines in
a more information-rich environment. At the highest infor-
mation level included in this experiment, copartisanship in-
creased the probability that a respondent selected a candidate
8. This is implemented in a fully saturated regression model interacting
copartisanship with dummy variables for each information level. This non-
parametric estimation approach does not depend on functional form as-
sumptions (Angrist and Pischke 2009, 51; Hainmueller et al. 2014, 15).
by 29 percentage points (95% confidence interval [21, 37]).
Between these two poles there is a decline in the effect of co-
partisanship on vote choice. There does not appear to be in-
creased cue taking even at high information levels.9
To provide a more concise summary of these results, table 1
displays estimates from regression models where information
amount enters the regression as a continuous variable. The mar-
ginal effects from this model are indicated by the gray line in
figure 2. This produces the estimate that each additional piece
of information reduces the effect of copartisanship on candi-
date preference by 4.5 percentage points (95% confidence in-
terval [25.6, 23.5]). As the right two columns of table 1
show, including controls for the information types available
in the candidate profiles and the particular levels the candidates
took on these attributes leaves the relationship between infor-
mation amount and reliance on partisan cues unchanged.10
Effects of information types on partisan voting
The previous section shows an overall decline in partisan
voting due to increased information. This section examines
heterogeneity in copartisan voting by the types of candidate
information provided. These models interact the types of in-
formation received with copartisanship to assess changes in
the effect of partisanship on candidate preferences due to the
availability of particular information types. A series of indi-
cator variables represent whether a particular type of infor-
mation was available in a candidate pairing. Figure 3 shows the
marginal effect of copartisanship when other types of candi-
date information are available, conditional on the total amount
of information an individual received.11
Figure 3 shows that the role of partisanship is most
sharply reduced when respondents have information about
the policy positions taken by the candidates on two key issues:
government spending and abortion. For example, relative to
a baseline with information about candidate race, the effect
of copartisanship declined by 24 percentage points (95% con-
fidence interval [232, 216]) when respondents received the
candidates’ positions on abortion policy. This decline aligns
9. The decline in partisan voting is particular prominent when mov-
ing from one piece of information to three and seven pieces of information
to nine. While this study focuses on the general relationship between and
partisan cue effectiveness, explaining this heterogeneity presents a topic
for future research.
10. Information type refers to the presence or absence of a particular
attribute (e.g, military service) in the candidate profiles. Information
content refers to the particular values of these attributes (e.g., served in the
military or did not serve in the military). Indicator variables for the
presence or absence of a particular attribute/attribute level are included in
the regressions to control for the presence of these features.
11. Appendix A, figures A8 and A9 show individual attribute effects
for Democrats and Republicans.
 Volume 79 Number 4 October 2017 / 1197

Table 1. Probability (Prefer Candidate) by Information Amount partisan match-ups, with a Republican candidate taking lib-
eral positions on abortion policy and government spending
Controls: facing a Democrat taking conservative positions on these
Controls: Info Type 1
same issues. High levels of polarization between the two par-
Baseline Info Type Content
ties in contemporary politics mean this type of candidate
pairing is rarely encountered by voters (McCarty, Poole, and
(Intercept) .147* .147* .148*
Rosenthal 2006). Previous research also finds that this sort of
(.015) (.015) (.015)
Copartisan .705* .705* .703* counter-stereotypical position taking can lead to harsh sanc-
(.030) (.030) (.030) tions for candidates at odds with their party’s reputation on
Information Amount .023* .023* .010 salient issues (Arceneaux 2008; Nicholson 2011). One possi-
(.003) (.003) (.006) bility is that the reduction in copartisan voting may be largely
Copartisan # driven by these counter-stereotypical match-ups.
Information Amount 2.045* 2.045* 2.045* To examine whether these findings are due to counter-
(.005) (.005) (.005)
stereotypical pairings, the left panel of figure 4 reestimates
N 6,216 6,216 6,216
these relationships after discarding 1,566 profile pairs with
Note. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by respondent. counter-stereotypical candidate pairs (i.e., profiles in which
* Indicates significance at p ! .05. the Republican candidate took a more liberal position than
the Democrat). These results are largely similar, although re-
moving these profiles slightly attenuates the extent to which
well with theories in which party labels are powerful, in part, additional information reduces the role of copartisanship in
because of the issue content they convey (e.g., Downs 1957; vote choice. Moving from the lowest to highest informa-
Sniderman and Stiglitz 2012). When this information is di- tion condition, the effect of copartisanship on candidate prefer-
rectly provided, party cues lose some of their importance. ences declines by 33 percentage points (95% confidence in-
Candidate profession, military service, family status, and terval [244, 223]). Even without counter-stereotypical issue
education also produce more moderate declines in party cue
effects, consistent with studies where personal characteristics of
politicians are also an important input into voting decisions
(e.g., McDermott 2005; Popkin 1991). For instance, relative
to the baseline condition with candidate race, the effect of
copartisanship declined by 11 percentage points (95% con-
fidence interval [219, 23]) for respondents who received in-
formation about a candidate’s education. Finally, partisan cues
exerted the strongest effect on voter preferences when the other
information consisted of candidate demographics such as age,
gender, and race. These are important candidate attributes
in their own right (e.g., Cutler 2002), but in this setting they
appear to have a more limited role, relative to these other types
of information, in reducing the effect of partisanship.
While figure 3 shows that information about issue posi-
tions is a large contributor to declines in partisan voting, one
potential concern is that these findings are conditional on the
distribution of candidate positions presented to voters in the
Figure 3. Effect of copartisanship on candidate support by information type.
experiment. As Hainmueller et al. (2014, 10–12) make clear,
Data from a conjoint survey experiment conducted on SSI (n p 1,059). Each
the treatment effect estimated for any individual attribute in respondent evaluated three profile pairs. Figure shows the effect of copar-
a conjoint design depends on the underlying distribution of tisanship on vote choice when different types of information are presented
the other attribute values in the experiment. Since no restric- along with party. Estimates obtained from a model interacting copartisanship
tions were imposed on candidate issue positions, they were with an indicator for whether a type of information was available in the pro-
file. The reference condition (indicated by the square point and dashed line)
unrelated to a candidate’s party affiliation. This means the ef- is the marginal effect of copartisanship in profiles with information about a
fects are conditional on a particular type of information flow candidate’s race. The 95% confidence intervals were obtained from robust
in which some candidate pairs involved counter-stereotypical standard errors, clustered by respondent.
1198 / Role of Information Environment in Partisan Voting Erik Peterson

Figure 4. Effect of copartisanship on candidate support—subset by information type. Data from a conjoint survey experiment conducted on SSI (n p 1,059).
Each respondent evaluated three profile pairs. Figure shows the effect of copartisanship on vote choice at varying levels of information subset by the types of
information in the profile. Estimates obtained from an interaction model interacting copartisanship with a separate dummy variable for each information
level. The 95% confidence intervals were obtained from robust standard errors, clustered by respondent. Gray lines indicate the marginal effect of copartisanship
from an interaction model where information amount is coded as a continuous variable.

information, additional information can still reduce individu-
als’ reliance on partisan cues.
As a final check on whether nonissue information can pro-
duce declines in partisan voting, the right panel of figure 4
examines whether these same patterns emerge when issue
content is entirely removed from the options presented to
respondents. This subsets the analysis to the 1,746 profiles in
which individuals received no issue information about the can-
didates and necessarily removes the highest information con-
dition in which all respondents received issue information.
Even without issue content there is still a decline in copartisan
voting when respondents are presented with additional infor-
mation. For example, moving from the low-information condi-
tion to one in which respondents received five additional pieces
of information the effect of copartisanship declined by 18 per-
centage points (95% confidence interval [236, —1]). While the
point estimate for the effect of copartisanship increases slightly
when moving from five to seven pieces of information when
no issues are present, this estimate is very imprecise as there
were relatively few of these profiles in which individuals re-
ceived no policy information (n p 46). Overall, while issue
content is a particularly strong contributor to reduced partisan
voting in the high information conditions, additional infor-
mation provision still reduces the role of partisanship even
when information about candidate positioning is unavailable.12
12. Table A8 in appendix B displays similar results when information
enters as a continuous variable.
STUDY 2: PARTISAN VOTING IN
CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS
The conjoint experiment shows that additional information
reduces the role of partisanship in vote choice. While findings
from conjoint experiments—particularly the paired profile de-
sign used here—have shown a high degree of external validity
when compared to real world decisions (Hainmueller, Han-
gartner, and Yamamoto 2015), it remains unclear how the
findings in the previous section generalize outside of a survey
experiment environment. There are two key concerns about
the generalizability of these results. First, the experiment in-
volved hypothetical candidates in an election that did not mat-
ter for the respondents. The broader campaign environment
in which elections take place means pressures to heed parti-
sanship may be more prominent during real elections (Gelman
and King 1993; Huddy et al. 2015; Iyengar et al. 2012). Second,
the experiment provided information directly to voters. Given
the public’s news consumption preferences, many individuals
will avoid encountering additional information if given the
option (Prior 2007).
This section turns to an observational analogue to the ex-
periment and examines variation in the role of copartisan-
ship in voting for Congress based on differences in the quality
of the information environment. Prior research reveals wide
variation in the extent to which newspapers—the primary
source of original reporting in the local media environment
(Mondak 1995; Pew 2010)—devote attention to congressional
elections (e.g., Arnold 2004; Hayes and Lawless 2015; Snyder
and Strömberg 2010). Several factors contribute to whether a
particular race receives media attention such as the economic

health of news outlets (Meyer 2008), the perceived competi-
tiveness of the election (Hayes and Lawless 2015), and the
manner in which media markets align with political constit-
uencies (Snyder and Strömberg 2010).
Snyder and Strömberg (2010) introduce a measure of the
extent to which voters receive information about their mem-
ber of Congress based on the alignment between media mar-
kets and congressional districts. This measure stems from the
finding that the amount of coverage a newspaper devotes to
a particular member of Congress is highly dependent on the
share of the paper’s readership residing in that district (see
also Arnold 2004; Hayes and Lawless 2015; Levy and Squire
2000). For example, if most of a newspaper’s readership re-
sides in a single congressional district with a small portion
spread across other districts, the member of Congress repre-
senting most of the paper’s readership will receive substan-
tially more press attention than representatives of the out-
lying districts. This means the newsreaders in outlying districts
encounter less coverage of their representative. Snyder and
Strömberg (2010) formalize this notion using a measure called
Congruence based on county-level newspaper sales data from
the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1982 and for every year be-
tween 1991 and 2004. For the period between 1983 and 1990,
a newspaper’s county sales figures are interpolated (Snyder and
Strömberg 2010, 362).
Congruence is defined at the level of county-congressional
district pairs and, averaging across all the newspapers with sub-
scribers in a given county, provides a measure of the average
share of newspaper readership living in that congressional dis-
trict. This measure is weighted by the market share of each
newspaper in that county. With c indexing counties, d index-
ing congressional districts, and m indexing each paper sold
in a given county, Snyder and Strömberg (2010) compute Con-
gruence in the following manner:
M the party line. For this reason, using these other types of mea-
Congruencecd p o Market Share
mp1
mc Reader Sharemd :
In this equation Market Sharemc always sums to one across
all the newspapers available in a county, Reader Sharemd ranges
between zero and one for each individual newspaper, and
Congruencecd ultimately ranges between zero (very low infor-
mation congressional districts) and one (very high informa-
tion congressional districts). To provide intuition on this mea-
sure, consider the simplified case where a single newspaper is
available in a county (i.e., Market Share is equal to one with
no need to sum over different newspapers). A congruence score
equal to one implies that all of the newspaper’s readers reside
in the same congressional district and indicates that the paper
will focus its reporting efforts on a single member of Congress
that is relevant to its entire readership. However, suppose in-
Volume 79 Number 4 October 2017 / 1199
stead that while the paper remains the sole news provider in
that particular county district, its readership is instead evenly
spread across two different congressional districts. The con-
gruence score for that particular county district would fall
to .5, indicating the paper would split its coverage efforts to
provide information to both sets of readers. This means news-
readers would often encounter reporting on a member of
Congress that did not represent them. Snyder and Strömberg
(2010, 369) validate this measure using the relationship be-
tween congruence and the number of articles written by a
newspaper about a particular member of Congress. They re-
port that a one standard deviation change in congruence is as-
sociated with the average person reading 10 additional news-
paper articles about their member of Congress each term.
Congruence measures the quality of the information envi-
ronment, with respect to congressional elections, in which
an individual resides. At high levels of congruence, —.voters
encounter more news about both the incumbent and chal-
lenger candidates in their district (Snyder and Strömberg 2010,
384). While less precise than varying information levels piece
by piece as in the conjoint experiment, variation in congruence
represents an observational analogue to earlier experimental
results. Importantly, congruence offers a plausibly exogenous
shift in the information environment. Previous research shows
that the relationships between congruence and congress-specific
voter knowledge are robust to a number of estimation ap-
proaches, an extensive battery of control variables, and pass
several placebo checks (e.g., Snyder and Strömberg 2010, 377).
This allows greater confidence in a causal interpretation of
any relationships between congruence and copartisan vot-
ing. This also sets congruence apart from candidate-controlled
sources of variation in the campaign information environment
(e.g., television advertising), which may be specifically tar-
geted toward voters or areas with a tendency to defect from
sures to characterize the information environment could pro-
duce a spurious relationship between information volume and
patterns of copartisan voting.
In what follows I use data matching respondents to the
National Election Studies to data on congruence for the pe-
riod between 1982 and 2004.13 I assess the role of copartisan-
ship in voting decisions in a similar manner to the conjoint
experiment by interacting an individual’s partisanship with
congruence to examine variation in voting for copartisan can-
didates based on the quality of the information environment.
This analysis employs two different specifications to isolate
13. This comes from the replication file for Snyder and Strömberg (2010;
http://www.jstor.org/stable/suppl/10.1086/652903/suppl_file/2008113data.zip).
1200 / Role of Information Environment in Partisan Voting Erik Peterson
the causal effect of the information environment on partisan
voting.
The first specification uses within-district variation in
congruence. Following notation from Snyder and Strömberg
(2010), i indexes individuals, c indexes counties and d indexes
congressional districts:
Vote Democratic Candidatei p b0 1 b1 Copartisani
1 b2 Congruencecd
1  b3 Copartisani
#Congruencecd
1    ady 1 gi 1 dc 1 ϵi :
Copartisan takes the value of one if the incumbent party
candidate in an individual’s district shares their party label
and zero otherwise; Congruence runs from zero to one and is
defined at the county-district level. The interaction between
these two variables allows for differences in the tendency of
individuals to vote for copartisan candidates at different lev-
els of congruence. The vector ady contains fixed effects for each
congressional district in each election year. This means the
only variation used in estimating this model occurs from in-
dividuals living in different counties of the same district. This
holds constant both observable (e.g., campaign spending) and
unobservable (e.g., the quality differential between the two
candidates) characteristics of these elections that do not vary
within district. Finally, gi is a vector of individual-level control
variables from the surveys including education, income, and
political interest; dc is a set of controls for county-level vari-
ables such as racial composition and median income.14 The
analysis is conducted among partisan respondents to the NES
in elections with candidates from each party.
A second redistricting specification uses changes in con-
gruence introduced at the county-level when the alignment
between media markets and political constituencies changes
due to redistricting. For example, a county may become more
congruent if during redistricting it is moved to a congressional
district that is better aligned with its local newspapers. To iso-
late variation in congruence due to redistricting, a fixed mea-
sure of each newspaper’s sales in a county (the average sales
over 1982–2004) is used for all years when calculating the ver-
sion of congruence used in the redistricting model. Since the
sales data do not change over time, the only variation in con-
gruence that occurs after placing county fixed effects into the
model stems from a county’s changing relationship to con-
gressional districts due to redistricting (see Snyder and Ström-
berg 2010, 376). The use of these over-time changes helps to
remove concerns that unmeasured variables cross-sectionally
14. See appendix B for a full list of these other covariates for both
model specifications.
correlated with congruence produce a spurious relationship be-
tween congruence and voting.
This specification takes the following form:
Vote Democratic Candidatei p b0 1 b1 Copartisani
1 b2 Congruencecd
1 b3 Copartisani
#Congruencecd
1 ac 1 asy 1 gi 1 rr 1 ϵi :
Here ac is a set of county-fixed effects, asy is a set of state-
year fixed effects, and rr is a set of control variables concerning
characteristics of a district’s incumbent congressional repre-
sentative.15 Other variables are the same as the within-district
model.
Figure 5 presents the marginal effect of copartisanship
on vote choice at different levels of congruence. For each
specification there is a downward slope in the marginal effect
of copartisanship on candidate support. This indicates that
in more information-rich media environments voters are
less likely to vote for copartisan members of Congress. Be-
cause there is an expectation that overload can occur at
particularly high levels of information, figure 5 contains
points which represent the marginal effects of copartisanship
on vote choice with congruence binned into three separate
categories rather than entering the regression in a continu-
ous manner. As in the conjoint experiment, this nonpara-
metric approach fails to reveal increased reliance on partisan
cues in high information environments.
Table 2 assesses the statistical significance of these rela-
tionships. In the within-district model the interaction be-
tween copartisanship and congruence falls short of con-
ventional levels of significance (p p .16, two-tailed test).
However, in the redistricting specification the interaction
between copartisanship and congruence is statistically signif-
icant. In substantive terms, a typical change in congruence—
which Snyder and Strömberg (2010, 369) report is equivalent
to the typical district resident reading 10 additional news-
paper articles per term about their incumbent representative—
produces an expected decline in an individual’s tendency
to vote for a copartisan candidate by .4 percentage points
(95% confidence interval [2.9, .1]) in the within-district model
and .8 percentage points (95% confidence interval [21.7,
2.04]) in the redistricting model.16
As a check on the degree to which these results can receive a
causal interpretation, table 3 presents estimates from several
15. These representative-specific control variables are all interacted
with representative partisanship to allow their consequences for Demo-
cratic support to vary based on incumbent partisanship.
16. This typical change is based on a one standard deviation shift in
congruence using the residual variation in congruence net of other
covariates included in the model.
 Volume 79 Number 4 October 2017 / 1201

Figure 5. Copartisanship and candidate support by level of congruence. Data from the National Election Study (1982–2004) (n p 4,792). Figure shows the
increase in the probability of voting for a copartisan congressional candidate at varying levels of media market congruence. Estimates from a model in-
teracting copartisanship with congruence. The 95% confidence intervals were obtained using robust standard errors, clustered by congressional race
(within-district model) or county (redistricting model). Points are estimates of the increase in support for copartisan candidates from an interaction model
with separate indicator variables for three binned levels of congruence.

placebo specifications relating congruence to vote choice in their analysis, which they attribute to media coverage infor-
elections for other offices. The notion behind these placebos is ming constituents of their incumbent representative’s accom-
that, as congruence is based around the alignment between plishments (see also Schaffner 2006). Paired with the findings
congressional districts and media markets, it should be unre- from study 2, this reveals a trade-off between incumbency
lated to the extent to which voters receive information about and partisan cues here that is not present in some other set-
other offices (Snyder and Strömberg 2010, 376). For example, a tings (e.g., Ansolabehere, Hirano, and Snyder 2006; Ansola-
newspaper can offer coverage of presidential politics that is behere and Snyder 2002) and suggests that the additional
relevant to all its readers, no matter its relationship to local incumbent-specific information received by more congruent
congressional districts. As table 3 indicates, these placebos are districts contributes to reduced partisan voting. Second, while
generally supportive as they fail to find an interaction between this demonstrates the capacity for the local media environ-
congruence and the tendency to vote for copartisan candidates ment to influence partisan voting, the analysis ends in 2004.
for governor or president (app. B contains tables for the within-
district specification). However, there is a relationship between
Table 2. Probability (Vote for Politician) by Level of Con-
congruence and copartisan voting in Senate elections that is
gruence
similar in magnitude to the finding in table 2.
These placebo results suggest some caution in interpret- Within District Redistricting
ing the congruence estimates as completely the product of
local media coverage of Congress, as congruence should not Congruence .22 .13
matter for Senate coverage. However, when paired with the (.20) (.10)
conjoint experiment and the generally supportive results for Copartisan .57* .62*
voting for the other two offices, this analysis provides some (.03) (.02)
evidence that information environments causally contribute Copartisan # Congruence 2.08 2.15*
to declines in copartisan voting (see app. B for a full descrip- (.06) (.05)
N 4,792 4,906
tion of these placebo results).
In assessing these results, several additional points are rel-
Note. Robust standard errors are in parentheses, clustered by congres-
evant. First, Snyder and Strömberg (2010, 383–87) identify a sional race (within-district) or county (redistricting).
larger incumbency advantage in high-congruence districts in * p ! .05.
1202 / Role of Information Environment in Partisan Voting Erik Peterson
Table 3. Probability (Vote for Politician) by Level of Con-
gruence—Redistricting Specification
Senator Governor President
Congruence .28* .05
(.11) (.13)
Copartisan .60* .55*
(.02) (.03)
Copartisan # Congruence 2.11* 2.03
(.04) (.06)
N 4,892 2,875
Note. Robust standard errors, clustered by county, are in parentheses. All
models include county and state-year fixed effects along with individual and
congressional race covariates.
* p ! .05.
Given the tremendous declines in the local newspaper indus-
try that have since occurred (Hayes and Lawless 2015; Meyer
2008; Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2013), the local media
environment today likely has less capacity to affect voter
preferences than in the period examined here. Finally, while
the direction of these findings is consistent with study 1, the
substantive effects of information on reduced partisan voting
are much smaller in study 2. The same features that make this
setting a tough test for observing information-induced declines
in partisan voting in the first place (e.g., no forced exposure
to information) also appear to attenuate the consequences of
changes in the information environment.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Across two studies more detailed information environments
reduced the extent to which individuals relied on partisanship
to structure their candidate preferences. The conjoint exper-
iment in study 1 allowed precise control of the information
provided to respondents and enabled an examination of the
contribution of different types of information to reduced co-
partisan voting. Study 2 used variation in the quality of the
local media environment for congressional elections to show
that these patterns persist even when partisan pressures are
high, elections have consequences and voters can choose to
avoid political information.
These findings demonstrate the conditions that underpin
large partisan cue effects. Absent other information, voters use
partisanship to evaluate candidates. They depend on partisan-
ship to a reduced, although still substantial, extent when pro-
vided with more detail. While previous research provided sug-
gestive evidence that high-information environments reduce
the effects of partisan cues on opinion (Bullock 2011, 510), this
study demonstrates it directly in two settings. Moreover, rather
than portraying information-rich settings as an abstract ideal
that arise only in experiments, study 2 demonstrates that high-
information local media environments have consequences for
voters’ reliance on partisanship in real elections.
Second, these findings challenge common mechanisms
2.06
thought to explain partisan cue effects. Along with several other
(.10)
.75*
studies, I find that cues fail to distort or mute the role of other
(.02) information as individuals form opinions about policies and
2.02 candidates (Boudreau and MacKenzie 2014; Bullock 2011).
(.04) While there are certainly countervailing instances in which
4,046 partisanship does lead individuals to engage in motivated pro-
cessing of information or ignore content that fails to align with
their partisan predispositions (Druckman et al. 2013; Slothuus
and De Vreese 2010), partisan cues fail to impede information
processing in a number of politically relevant settings. What
conditions lead partisan cues to interact with information pro-
cessing? Explaining this type of cross-study variation represents
an important next step for this line of research (see also Leeper
and Slothuus 2014).
Third, these results contrast with expectations that in-
creased information provision may increase voters’ reliance
on partisan cues (e.g., Lau and Redlawsk 2001). The findings
here show that more information, at least over the levels
available in congressional elections, does not appear to have
this consequence. This may change if even more detailed in-
formation environments were examined. For example, Barton
(2015) reports high levels of self-reported information over-
load in presidential election campaigns. However, the settings
examined here are relevant for a wide array of political sit-
uations. Study 1 approximates the detailed voter guides pro-
vided to voters by media outlets (e.g., Mummolo and Peter-
son 2016), and study 2 examines real-world variation in the
amount of information offered by newspapers.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Justin Grimmer, Jay Hamilton, Shanto Iyengar, Rune
Slothuus, Jonathan Mummolo, and Gabor Simonovits for
helpful comments and suggestions and David Strömberg for
sharing data. Previous versions of this article were presented
at annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Associa-
tion and American Political Science Association.
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