Low Information Voter

A low information voter, sometimes called a misinformation voter, is a person who casts a ballot despite possessing little substantive knowledge about the political issues or candidates involved, a phrase that originated in the United States and became prominent from the mid 1990s onward. The American political scientist and pollster Samuel Popkin introduced the term low information in his 1991 book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns, using the phrase low-information signaling to describe how such voters lean on simple shortcuts or heuristics rather than detailed policy knowledge when deciding whom to support, such as voters favoring Bill Clinton partly because he was seen eating at McDonald's, or viewing John Kerry and Barack Obama as elitist because of recreational activities like windsurfing and golf. Compared with better-informed voters, low information voters tend to hold more moderate ideological positions, vote less often, gravitate toward candidates they find personally appealing, behave more often as swing voters, and split their tickets between parties more frequently, patterns researchers attribute to their comparatively undeveloped ideological frameworks.