Order effect in a study on US voters' preferences: quantum framework representation of the observables

The US political system in the recent years has been mainly formed by a Divided Government, which is regarded as a consequence of 'non-separability' of voters' preferences. The non- separability phenomenon emerges as a result of strong correlations that the voters establish between their preferences for the Congress and the White House contests. We investigate with help of the empirical data from the Smith et al (1999 J. Polit. Sci. 43 737–764) study what implications the upcoming information (encoded in the observables- questions) has on the non- separability emergence. We show that the informational context of the questions alters the preference frequencies that cannot be captured in a classical probabilistic framework. We attribute the changes to the incompatibility of observables C and P, which correspond to questions being asked. We embed our data in a quantum framework and model the voters' mental state evolution as it is impacted by the operators, to show the non-commutativity of the transition probabilities as a result of the question order effect. (paper)