Beyond assimilation and contrast: Information effects, ideological magnification, and the vote

Spatial voting models assume that parties and candidates advertise their ideological positions to maximize electoral support. Voters, however, view party locations through a distorted lens. The presence of these assimilation and contrast effects has been extensively described by the existing literature. Yet while many studies acknowledge the importance of information biases in survey responses, we lack the tools to explicitly incorporate them into existing spatial models of voting. This paper proposes a strategy that incorporates information effects in existing spatial models of the vote, using a heteroscedastic proximity model. We test the proposed model on data from eighteen democracies. Results demonstrate how information stretches or compresses the ideological space and open up new avenues for future work.