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Sex and the ballot box: perception of ballot measures regarding same-sex marriage and abortion in California

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2013

Craig M. Burnett  and
Mathew D. McCubbins
Craig M. Burnett
Affiliation:
Department of Public and International Affairs, University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Leutze Hall, Wilmington, NC, USA E-mail: [email protected]
Mathew D. McCubbins
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science and School of Law, Duke University, Gross Hall, Durham, NC, USA E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Voters in many American states have considered important social policies that redefine civil liberties within their state through the initiative and referendum. An important question remaining is, are voters knowledgeable enough to make decisions on these social policies that have far-reaching effects? The common wisdom is that voters rely on information shortcuts in lieu of extensive knowledge about the issues. Unlike candidate elections, however, ballot measures lack some prominent and useful information shortcuts (i.e. party identification). We test the hypothesis that voters use shortcuts to inform their decisions on two ballot measures central to today's policy debates: California's Proposition 4 on parental notification for abortion and Proposition 8 on same-sex marriage. We show that voters do not use cues universally, and, furthermore, factual information has a limited effect on voters’ decisions. In particular, we find that the persuasiveness of an endorsement is conditional on whether an individual trusts the source.

Keywords

abortion lawcuesdirect democracyProposition 8same-sex marriage
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Public Policy , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , April 2014 , pp. 3 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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