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Political scientists Richard Lau at Rutgers and David Redlawsk at the University of Iowa have developed four models of how people actually pick candidates. No partisan or demographic group is predisposed to a particular model, and a voter might use different strategies for different contests. … More than 70% of the time, voters end up checking the box for the candidate who shares their views. …
Passive Voter: You don’t look for facts about the candidates, other than their party affiliation. …
Frugal Voter: You learn the candidates’ stands only on topics you really care about, ignoring all else. …
Intuitive Voter: You seek only enough information to reach a decision. … the process appears to be almost unconscious. …
Rational Voter: You actively seek as much information as possible about all candidates, consider the positives and negatives and evaluate them against your personal interests.
Because you learn so much about both sides, this strategy is highly likely to lead to a vote across party lines.
This strategy is also the most likely to result in a incorrect choice – picking a candidate who does not reflect your views. Researchers think that many people can’t process all they learn and simply become confused.
Source: How Voters Decide: Information Processing During Election Campaigns, by Richard R. Lau and David P. Redlawsk 2007.
Got that? Voters who try to learn more than just a few things end up less able to pick candidates who share their views. So either humans just aren’t capable of supporting a more informed democracy, or our most "informed" voters aren’t really trying to make a good choice. Apparently for them, voter information isn’t about voting policy.
Informed Voters Choose Worse
Here is another spin on the topic of rational voting:
"The founders of the United States didn’t have the advantages of fMRI brain imaging and had no concept of the amygdala, but they were hesitant about political parties and political campaigning nonetheless. Fearful that a “torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose,” Alexander Hamilton railed against political parties in the first Federalist Paper, saying the parties would try to “increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.”
It turns out there was some reason to be concerned about the relative influence of information versus emotion when it comes to political judgments and affiliations. Though it is impossible to know for sure whether people actually vote along party lines, many psychological studies have shown that political affiliation plays a large role not just in the voting booth but also when people must decide how they feel about political issues."
From: http://www.psychologicalsci...
Geez, I don't recall any of these empirical insights being expressed as axioms that a social choice function has to satisfy.
"Efforts to better 'inform' oneself on issues/candidates are futile...
Worse than futile, they waste your precious time better spent elsewhere."
I think people are missing the most important news filters of all: You. You can filter the noise and get a good grasp on policies.
Most rhetoric, like speeches, can safely be ignored or taken with a huge grain of salt. Anyone trying to get elected has to say things to appeal to certain demographics of the population without offending other demographics too much, so as to appeal to the widest variety of people as possible.
For example, in most press, Barack Obama talks about 'main street and wall street'. You know, he's for 'main street' and against 'wall street'. What does that mean? Nothing. It doesn't mean anything. It's just something he says in speeches to hopefully appeal to a broad group of people who don't like 'wall street', whatever that means. Big business? Both mainstream candidates got most of their campaign money from big companies, so it's definitely not that. There's plenty of examples of rhetoric like that from McCain or any other politician, of course.
Personal stories about the candidates and profiles of their kids and how much they weight and how tall they are and where they shop and all this trivial information is easy to get drawn into, but it doesn't mean anything. All that news is pushed at the general population because we humans are drawn to people, not ideas (there was a recent post here about this).
The point is, ignore the rhetoric. Actions speak louder than words. If you want to see what a person will do in the future, look at what they did in the past. Look at where the money is coming from, look at what that group or political party has done in the past, and look at history to get an idea of what's going on. That's a lot of work, and every source of information has their own agenda, so it's up to you to weight things as you see fit.