Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on July 29, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(3):521-536; doi:10.1093/poq/nfp040
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Helping Citizens Decide in Referendums
The Moderating Effect of Political Sophistication on the Use of the Information and Choice Questionnaire as a Decision Aid
Address correspondence to Peter Neijens; e-mail: p.c.neijens{at}uva.nl
Voters often lack sufficient knowledge to make educated decisions. We investigated how a decision aid-–the Information and Choice Questionnaire (ICQ)—helped them make more consistent decisions. The ICQ is designed for large-scale use and provides voters with information about a specific problem before asking them for their opinions. It provides citizens with information summarizing a full range of viable policy options and the probable consequences of each, as provided by experts. We investigated the ICQ in the context of the Dutch 2005 referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty. Respondents (N = 340) constituted a random sample of the Dutch population. We studied the effects of the ICQ on vote preferences and the consistency of voters’ preferences shortly before the referendum. We were especially interested in the moderating role of political sophistication on the uses and effects of the ICQ. Our study confirmed that many voters had little knowledge about the European Constitution and had inconsistent preferences. The ICQ made their vote preferences more consistent, especially for those participants with lower levels of political sophistication. This suggests that this decision aid can narrow the gap between the politically sophisticated and the politically less sophisticated.
PETER NEIJENS AND CLAES DE VREESE are with the Amsterdam School of Communications Research ASCoR, University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Peter Neijens is Professor and Chair of Persuasive Communication and Claes de Vreese is Professor and Chair of Political Communication. We gratefully acknowledge support for this work by grant 400-04-001 from the Dutch National Science Foundation N W O awarded to the authors. We would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments. Thanks to Thomas Klausch (ASCoR) for his statistical advice.