Elections and Information Cascades
Voting in the presidential election is a highly publicized event by the media every four years. We all know that on Election Day, every single media outlet is giving live updates of the polls and who’s in the lead/ how far in the lead. This shows people who haven’t voted yet, who everyone else in the country thinks should win. On a more extreme level, since the polls close at the same time in every time zone, the winners are announced in the Eastern Time zone when there is still three hours of voting left on the west coast. In 1994 Robert K. Goidel and Todd G. Shields did a study called “The Vanishing Marginals, the Bandwagon, and the Mass Media” in which 180 students were randomly assigned to groups and were asked the questions about the same election, but only 70% of them received information about the expected winner. It turned out that independents were twice as likely to vote for the Republican Party when the expected winner was Republican. Furthermore when the expected winner was a Democrat, independent and weak Republicans were more likely to vote Democratic. This study proved that when you know what everyone else’s vote is, it alters your vote that would originally be based solely on your personal beliefs and ideals.
This is an exact example of information cascades because people assume that if the majority of people vote for the candidate they weren’t going to vote for initially, then everyone else knows something that they don’t. This is how an information cascade forms, when people abandon their beliefs and join the choices of those that have already made their choices public. The problem here is that the people before them, whose actions they are basing their choice on could have done the exact same thing. The majority choice could be based on very little information. For example the East coast could be completely Republican, and the rest of the country could be mixed, but majority Democratic. If the Independents didn’t know any of the results, then they would just vote based on their beliefs. On the other hand if they knew the results from the East coast, only ¼ of the US, then they would vote Republican since that is what the majority did before them. The key idea is that the majority is only a majority of the fourth of the US, not the true majority of the country. In close elections, these Independents could be the deciding factor. This is why the voting system for presidential elections promotes information cascades.
Study Source:
“The Vanishing Marginals, the Bandwagon, and the Mass Media” by Robert K. Goidel and Todd G. Shields
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6285224&fileId=S002238160007732X