PhD Candidate Sarah Lachance will present at talk titled, “Foraging for Policy: Ambiguity as a Heuristic” as part of the Electoral Chairs’ Seminars. This talk will be in French and hosted on Zoom.
PhD Candidate Sarah Lachance
Despite democratic norms of transparency and accountability, electoral candidates often take ambiguous policy positions by making vague or contradictory statements. Yet, the dominant assumption in the literature on voter behaviour is that voters are risk-averse. This poses a puzzle: if voters are risk-averse and dislike ambiguity, why do candidates take ambiguous policy positions? To answer this question, this study uses insights from ecological rationality and foraging theory. I argue that voters must deal with an uncertain environment. They are satisficers who seek a “good-enough”—rather than optimal—decision. In this context, ambiguity is not necessarily penalized. To test this, I field an experiment that simulates an electoral campaign in Canada, the United States and Germany. The results provide evidence that voters use the ambiguity of policy statements by major party candidates as a cue for non-centrist policy positions. Since the experiment uses actual party labels, voters can use their knowledge of the parties’ policy reputation to put bounds on how extreme the ambiguous candidates’ policy positions can plausibly be. As a result, policy ambiguity attracts voters who sit between the centre and the extremes, yet it does so without repelling centrist and extremist voters. This finding offers a solution to the puzzle by explaining why policy ambiguity is an attractive strategy for electoral candidates.
