The Cost of Flip-Flops: The Electoral Consequences of Candidate Ambiguity

Campaign politics are kind of like a box of chocolates. You never really know what you're going to get, but you can be pretty sure that you'll get a few of the same pieces in each box. 

In the United States, one of these pieces that we get every two or four years is the flip-flop (sometimes called a waffle). A flip-flop is not merely a breakfast food, but can also be when someone holds one policy position before holding a different policy position. The more the latter position contradicts the former position, the bigger the flip-flop (see this website that has a rating system for degree of flipping and flopping). 

Accusing one's opponent of flip-flopping has become the dominant candy in the box of chocolates. For evidence of this, just google "political flip-flop." You'll see 3.53 MILLION pages returned. 

For some bipartisan examples, let's recall President (then Governor) Bill Clinton's 1992 attacks on President George H. W. Bush for flip-flopping on taxes.

And, President George W. Bush's comical attack on Senator John F. Kerry's flip-flopping on a number of issues.

And, the newly available flip-flop footwear with the opposition candidate's face and name on them.

So, it's clear that attacking one's opponent by calling them a flip-flopper or a waffler is common. But, do those attacks work? And, is there some reason why candidates choose to flip-flop on some issues?

At the Summer Institute in Political Psychology, Michael Tomz presented the findings from a paper he and Robert van Houweling published in the 2009 issue of the American Political Science Review in which they try to answer these questions.

These researchers hypothesized that flip-flopping could lead voters to have positive OR negative perceptions of the candidates. Flip-flopping might actually lead people to think that the inconsistent candidate is open-minded, flexible, and responsive to new data. Alternately, voters may come to view the inconsistent candidate as lacking integrity and honesty, and perceive the candidate as willing to say anything to get elected. This negative effect should dissuade candidates from changing their views, lest they suffer the wrath of countless attack ads.

In Tomz and van Houweling's research, they had participants read about two fictitious candidates, one of whom had flip-flopped on an issue. After reading about the candidates, the  participants evaluated the character of the candidates and their confidence in how the candidate would stand on issues if s/he was elected.

Holding all other variables constant, randomized flip-flopping led to an 11% penalty in the polls. However, the story gets more complicated. This effect is particularly true for partisans and when the flip-flop is on an issue that some bloc of voters deems important.

If this is the case, then it would be most sensible for candidates to stay consistent on issues that have appeal across the aisle and be ambiguous about the key issues for one's own party, because members of the candidate's party assume that the candidate shares their view regardless of any clear statement of that view.

Thus, ambiguity can be strategically used by candidates to appeal to specific groups that might not ordinarily support them. If done inappropriately, it can ring the final bell and effectively bring a campaign to its knees... unless it can also frame the other candidate as an ambiguous flip-flopper.

With these implications, we should expect to see a growing barrage of flip-flopper attacks as the 2012 US Presidential Election approaches.

Are we a nation of flip-floppers? A Brief Review of Attitude Research

As absurd as it sounds, people may not have "attitudes."

For democracy to function, its citizens must hold attitudes and then vote in ways that advance their preferences and hold elected officials accountable for their actions (or inactions, in some cases). Political scientists have long debated whether people actually hold attitudes. The most vocal proponent of this perspective is Phil Converse, co-author of The American Voter. In this seminal text, the authors examined national election study data from 1948 to 1956 and found that the respondents were inconsistent in their policy preferences from year-to-year and these preferences did not predict voting behavior. These findings led Converse to conclude that people did not have attitudes or coherent clusters of attitudes (also known as ideology). 

Social psychologists assumed people held attitudes, but often found that people's attitudes did not predict their behavior. If people's evaluations of activities, beliefs, policies did not predict whether they acted upon them, then the prospect for the existence of attitudes was bleak. Attitude researchers, fearing the absolution of their topic, sought out to squelch this fear by demonstrating that attitudes just weren't being measured right.

Over time, social psychologists found evidence suggesting two measurement-related explanations for the poor behavior prediction of attitudes. First, they found that attitudes can predict behavior, if the measured attitude is very specific to the behavior to be performed. For example, if I ask you how much you like dessert foods, I might be able to predict that you're going to eat chocolate cake when reading my blog, but I am more likely to be wrong in predicting that you're eating cake now than if I had asked you how much you like to eat chocolate cake when reading about political psychology on the internet. Second, they found that social norms and the motivation to appear to hold socially-desirable attitudes (not being racist, for example) can also create the appearance of attitudes being unrelated to behavior. In an attempt to get around biased responding on sensitive subjects, scholars created "implicit" attitude measures that make it difficult (if not impossible) for participants to respond in a socially-desirable way (see some examples of these measures on the Project Implicit website). 

Brian Nosek wrote an excellent summary of the disconnect between implicit and explicit attitudes, showing that the more socially-acceptable it is to hold an attitude, the more implicit and explicit measures converge. For example, people are plenty comfortable reporting their attitudes toward Democrats and Republicans, but less comfortable reporting their attitudes toward thin people and fat people. There are other reasons why implicit and explicit attitudes diverge (e.g., affect, familiarity with attitude objects, etc.), but that is beyond the scope of this post. The key point is that people have some attitudes, but are sometimes unable or unwilling to state what those attitudes are.

So what attitudes do people hold? Which attitudes are they willing to express?

Jon Krosnick presented on his research at the Stanford Summer Institute in Political Psychology suggesting that people tend to hold a few attitudes about issues important to them, and have fickle non-attitudes about issues that are less important. The attitudes people deem important to them usually correspond to values that they learned in their youth (and, potentially inherit via their genetics, although this is still debated). 

As people age into young adulthood they form selective social networks which reinforce their policy preferences and further strengthen the policy attitudes. As attitudes become stronger, they grow increasingly resistant to persuasive attempts and stable over time (that is, less likely to appear as the non-attitudes that Converse described). Attitude strength also predicts the way we process information. When we hold strong attitudes, we are much more likely to process information in a biased and "motivated" way, where we seek out evidence that supports our belief and may not even see disconfirming evidence that is in front of us (Lord, Ross, and Lepper have some very cool research on this phenomenon called "biased assimilation"). And, lastly, attitude strength affects behavior. People with strong attitudes are much more likely to engage in behaviors that will further their cause. Think, for example, of someone with strong attitudes on abortion. They are much more likely to participate in a protest than someone who doesn't have as strong of an attitude.

This theory of attitude strength responds to the threats to democracy highlighted in The American Voter by showing that people do hold attitudes on some issues (even if they couldn't care less about others), important attitudes lead to a more responsible citizenry, and the government does receive feedback on the issues of the day from many different constituents (although this feedback comes from different people on different issues).

Furthermore, these findings have implications for political practice. Specifically, when candidates are speaking about a policy issue, they are really speaking to the small segment of the electorate that deems that policy issue as important while those who view that issue as unimportant tune out. Further, when the majority of voters favor the candidate's policy position, the candidate should openly state the position. However, when the  majority of voters with strong attitudes oppose the candidate's position, the candidate should remain mute. Lastly, politically-minded folks should recognize that trying to change the policy position of someone who already has a strong attitude on that policy is futile. The better tact, according to Krosnick, is trying to persuade potential voters to enhance the importance they attach to issues where the voters and candidates agree.

So, are we a nation of flip-floppers? Of course not. Well, at least not on attitudes that we deem to be important to us. On other matters, though, a coin-flip may be good enough.