How Information Cascades Effect the Iowa Caucus and Presidential Nominations
The Iowa Caucus for the presidential race in the US has been a long-standing tradition that carries an additional weight – the winners of the caucus are likely to remain in good standing for the remainder of the primaries. In the past, the Iowa caucus results have become increasingly reflective of the future winner of the presidential nominee. Since 1980, only one presidential nominee of the Democratic party won the nomination without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire, showing that these initial state primaries have a large say in the outcome. This is due greatly to both the interesting setup of the primary and its position as the first primary in the series of all the states, both of which are conducive to information cascades that significantly impact current and future events.
Information cascades are when we have extreme outcomes where everyone makes the same choice based on information they receive and the information they take in from others making a choice. The Iowa caucus operates on this in the principle way it is run; the democratic primary in Iowa is not voted on by secret ballot, which has large implications for information cascades. The process consists of voters physically splitting themselves up into groups of supporters, where everyone can see how large the support is from each candidate. Representatives from sections go around to recruit more and more people for their candidate, and after a time, officials eliminate candidates with less than 15% of the caucus goers. This causes more shift to groups, again and again, until a result is reached. This can result in an information cascade because everyone can see what everyone else is choosing, but not why they are choosing it. The more people supporting one candidate, the more likely they are to pull in even more support; outsiders making a decision view the group all choosing the same candidate as a sign that this candidate is a good choice. This creates a snowball effect where one candidate pulls ahead, due to people following the wisdom of the crowd.
Furthermore, the results of the Iowa caucuses themselves tend to cause a cascade. While voter turnout is low and the diversity of voters in Iowa is low, the winners of these primaries, for both Republicans and Democrats, can often cause a ripple in the rest of the primaries, allowing candidates to surge with momentum and sometimes gain unexpected stature. One of the reasons this happens is because the media and the candidates both place a lot of importance on this election. So much money, so much news coverage goes into these primaries that the public feels the weight of the primaries and takes it into account heavily. The fabricated importance of the Iowa caucus causes a cascade, where people support candidates that did well there because it is an important one to win; this causes both a cascade and a cycle, where each year the results of the caucus cause candidates to spiral to success and then again place importance on the results of the caucus based on this massive success. Money speaks bigger than word in politics, so when PACs and super PACs support frontrunners of the caucus, again people are inclined to believe that those PACs hold information that causes them to believe the frontrunners are much better than the others. The money, the candidates, the media all push this information cascade, causing people to put a false importance on the race, converting it to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Iowa caucus results matter because enough people believe that they matter. The results of the caucus thus cause a two-fold information cascade: the belief that the winning candidate is best, and the belief that the Iowa caucus is impactful.
https://www.vox.com/a/presidential-primaries-2016-republican-democrat/iowa-caucuses-explained