Cross-Pressure and Voting Behavior: Evidence from Randomized Experiments

Cross-pressured partisans are commonly viewed as persuadable, and campaigns routinely target these voters in elections. Yet evidence of the causal impact of policy cross-pressures on voting behavior is limited. We deployed randomized experiments to examine whether (and how) nonpartisan information that highlighted policy cross-pressures affected voting in the 2015 Kentucky gubernatorial election. Our results suggest partisans conflicted with their party’s gubernatorial nominee on the issue of Kynect, Kentucky’s health-care exchange, who were exposed to information about the candidates’ positions were more likely to report defection intentions in a preelection survey, but these did not necessarily materialize on Election Day. Information exposure seems to have produced few discernible effects on voting overall, based on self-reports in postelection surveys we conducted, but an examination of validated voting records suggests cross-pressured partisans were generally more likely to abstain when provided with the policy positions of both gubernatorial candidates.