The Effects of Network Expertise and Biases on Vote Choice

Many citizens lack the political knowledge to make informed decisions partly due to the high costs of becoming informed. Previous scholars have argued that if individuals speak with political experts who share their preferences, they can vote as if they were informed without paying information costs. This view of citizens as single-minded seekers of low-cost information is unrealistic. Individuals often choose discussion partners for reasons unrelated to politics, and many communication networks have heterogeneous information levels and preferences as a result. This paper simulates the votes of hypothetical electorates with different individual and network information levels. It demonstrates that network expertise has an effect on vote choice, but this effect is not as large as the effect of individual expertise. Rather, the key contextual determinant of an individual's vote is the partisan composition of his or her discussion network.