The Role of Non-Policy Campaign Cues on Presidential Vote Choice: Are Uninformed Voters More Susceptible to these Messages?

Political knowledge is unevenly distributed, and those with the highest amounts are concentrated amongst the politically and socially advantaged. The socioeconomic heterogeneity within the Latino electorate in the United States exemplifies such a distribution. This paper analyzes how political information influences a Latino voter’s use of non-policy campaign messages for the 2000 presidential election. I contend that low-information Latinos will be most influenced by candidates who use non-policy campaign cues, because of their weak priors. In contrast, it is expected that high-information Latinos will be more resistant to non-policy related campaign cues, since their stored levels of political knowledge are high. Findings indicate that low-information Latinos are indeed more likely to use non-policy related cues, relative to high-information Latinos. Such differences in stored political knowledge also affect Latino vote choice, where high-information Latinos behave according to the spatial model of voting, and low-information Latinos do not.