Jobban tudják-e az okos szavazók? Az iskolázottság, a hírfogyasztás és a politikai érdeklődés szerepe a pártos elfogultság alakulásában
Are smart voters better decision-makers? The effect of education, news consumption and political interest on the extent of partisan bias

Summary/Abstract: Numerous notable books have warned about the deleterious effect of voters' uninformedness. While some works depict the role of sophistication as an attribute which decreases partisan bias and thus enhances democratic functioning (Brennan, 2017; Somin, 2016), other authors, like Achen and Bartels (2016) argue that sophisticated citizens are at least as biased as their unsophisticated counterparts. Our study's aim is to clarify the link between sophistication and partisan bias in order to find evidence/counter evidence/counterevidence for the widespread theoretical assertion that smart voters are actually better decision-makers as they are less biased. We look at the effect of political interest, education and political information acquisition on the extent of partisan bias. We use European Social Survey data to test our research question. We find that while education does not appear to have a bias-inducing effect on citizens' information processing, information acquisition and political interest positively and significantly increase partisan bias. Our results are in accordance with the vast majority of earlier empirical evidence on the role of sophistication but may question some well-established claims in connection with the role of education in biased information processing. In other words, the findings do not support the optimistic conceptions on the role of sophistication but they fully underline the interpretation of Achen and Bartels (2016) on the role of sophistication.

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