Theories of Learning Last week: –campaign finance –nominations and candidate selection The marketing of candidates –how do people learn from signals? –who collects information about politics?

What are the major influences on selection of nominees and how have they changed over time? campaign finance regulation –hard money vs. soft/independent money –government subsidy vs. going alone party interests and popular preferences –nominating conventions –primary elections and selection of delegates campaign dynamics media structure and communications costs

Campaigns and voting What are campaigns for? –getting out the vote: activating and mobilizing high-probability supporters –persuasion: informing undecided voters about the alternatives The first goal has little to do with learning or persuasion; the second has a lot to do with both How do we learn from others?

Models of learning Signaling models –cheap talk and similarity of preferences –inference from costly actions; penalties for lying; verification Psychological experiments in learning –priming –framing

Signaling models Cheap talk –under what conditions can a listener learn about the world from a sender who pays no costs and bears no risk for communicating? –key condition is similarity of preferences if sender’s goals and receiver’s goals don’t conflict, no incentive to mislead; if they are congruent, this is a coordination game –true cheap talk is rare in politics because repeated interactions/overlapping generations allow for reputations to develop reputations/brand names are commitment mechanisms; a candidate/commentator with one can be persuasive even without similarity of goals

Costly Talk Reputation is an example of risky talk –sender puts valuable reputation up as bond; loss of reputation is example of a penalty for lying Other examples of learning from signals –costly action: sender pays a fee to send a signal –verification: sender’s statement can be evaluated by a third party who is motivated to expose falsehoods (e.g., the press) Preference for biased information sources –when a liberal says something good about a conservative, or vice-versa

Priming and Framing Kahneman & Tversky’s prospect theory –conventional expected utility maximization models tend to use symmetric utility functions –K&T hypothesize an evaluative asymmetry between the domain of losses and the domain of gains –decision frames describe the psychological context surrounding an individual’s choice priming is raising the salience of a particular issue or context framing is the manipulation of the decision frame surrounding a person’s opinion-formation on a question

Prospect theory and politics Implication: spin control is potentially important –binary choices can be reversed via subtle changes in decision frame Who controls the policy/issue agenda? How much room is there for priming by strategic actors in politics? Who controls the selection of decision frame? –do different people choose different frames? If so, why and under what conditions?