Guns in the Ballot Box: Information, Groups, and Opinion in Ballot Initiative Campaigns

This article examines the extent to which a change in the information environment affected opinion of a recent gun safety ballot initiative in Washington. Through content analysis of newspaper stories and documentation of expenditures of competing interests, the authors are able to detect a discernable shift in the information environment during the final weeks of the campaign. Support for the initiative dropped appreciably concurrent with this shift. The authors are able to show that the altered information context (a) generated the greatest change among the most politically aware respondents and (b) sustained this effect within specific partisan classifications. Although previous research investigates analogous behavioral dynamics in a variety of political settings, this analysis differs in application to ballot initiative campaigns. The authors discuss the implications of their findings in terms of direct democracy campaigns and conclude that influence of competing interests are central to the nature and outcome of the election.