Dr. Arthur Lupia

Dr. Lupia conducts research on the role of learning and persuasion on political interaction as well as research on the positive and normative consequences of institutional design. He has so far studied these problems in the context of voting on referendums, stability in parliamentary democracy, the relationship between legislators and bureaucrats, the relationship between regulators and the regulated, the Voting Rights Act of 1982, and the role of evolving communication technologies on fundamental political practices. He uses methods such as game theory, laboratory experiments, public opinion polls and statistical inference and draws on premises from the fields of American politics, comparative politics, microeconomics, philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences.

General research topics:
Voter Competence;
Initiatives and Referendums; Direct Democracy;
Credibility;
Institutions;
How Federal Mandates and Voter Initiatives affect State Government;
Internet and Politics.

Lengthier Description of Expertise:
Arthur Lupia examines how information and institutions affect policy and politics. He studies how people make decisions when they lack information and has applied these insights to topics such as voting and elections, civic competence, legislative-bureaucratic relations, parliamentary governance, and the role of the media and the internet in politics. He is co-author of two books, The Democratic Dilemma: Can Citizens Learn What They Need to Know? and Stealing the Initiative: How State Government Reacts to Direct Democracy, and co-editor of Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality. His many articles appear in political science, economics, and law journals, and his editorials are published in leading newspapers. His research has been supported by groups that include the World Bank, the Public Policy Institute of California, the Markle Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. It has also received multiple honors including the National Academy of Sciences' Award for Initiatives in Research. He is Principal Investigator for the new NSF-sponsored Time-shared Experiments for the Social Sciences infrastructure project and is a member of the National Election Studies' Board of Overseers. He also serves on the editorial board of the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and Political Behavior, and is Political Science’s official representative to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He presents lectures on his research regularly, having made over 140 professional presentations in 11 countries.

Received the ''Emerging Scholar Award'' from the American Political Science Association Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior section.

I am no conducting research that clarifies principles for effective civic education. The goal of the research, stated broadly, is to answer two questions:
1. Under what conditions does a new communicative opportunity increase the competence of any particular subset of participants?
2. Given a set of initial conditions regarding participant knowledge and communicative assets, what kinds of intervention are necessary or sufficient to increase competence?

One example of this new work focuses on how people interact with political web sites. It involves several types of surveys and experiments that are designed to uncover aspects of web site content, presentation, and design that affect viewer recall and subsequent action. Applications to a wide range of Internet marketing strategies are possible.