CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Popa, Sebastian Adrian |
|---|---|
| Title | Assessing the Role of Voters' Political Information in Electoral Decisions: Bringing New Evidence Using Simulation Methods |
| Summary | The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between political information and voters’ capacity to make good/correct electoral decisions as understood by proximity theories. More precisely, the question is: does information have an effect on the capacity of voters to choose the candidate closest to them? The data used in the analysis comes from the post-electoral American National Election Survey. Analyzing the effects of information across different models by using a statistical simulation method which improves on similar methods by Bartels (1996), Toka (2008) and Toka and Popescu (2008), I will show that information has at best a small effect on the capacity of individuals to make correct electoral decisions, and that indeed simulating an increase in the level of political information will not increase the proportion of respondents choosing the right candidate. Furthermore investigating how the difference between more and less sophisticated voters evolves in time, I clearly show that an increased disparity in information, as hypothesized by the knowledge gap, does not influence the difference in proximity between the two group. Thus using cognitive mechanisms such as heuristics or emotions do work effectively, as they compensate for an increasing disparity in information. |
| Supervisor | Littvay, Levente |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/popa_sebastian.pdf |
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