CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Oana, Ioana-Elena |
|---|---|
| Title | When does information matter? Complexity, cognitive heuristics and democratic competence |
| Summary | This study aims to analyze how the political environment influences the usage of cues as aids in political decision-making. In particular, it plans to provide empirical evidence on how cues can be used for emulating fully informed behavior in political settings of different levels of complexity with regard to the number of candidates in the system and their ideological differentiation. Political environments of different complexity levels were, thus, simulated in an experiment conducted on a sample of 198 Hungarian citizens. Subjects’ voting decisions and evaluations of fictional candidates were examined by using Chi-Square, MANOVA and t-test analyses suggesting that increasing the complexity of the political environment has a negative effect on subjects’ effective cue usage. While subjects managed on average to emulate a fully informed behavior in a two-candidate ideologically polarized setting, they were not able to use cues effectively in a more complex system. Additionally, controlling for several demographic and ideological characteristics, the results also shed light on which groups of citizens could be helped more by cues in environments of different levels of complexity. Namely, leftists were able to identify their preferred candidate easier than rightists in a two-candidate polarized system. |
| Supervisor | Levente Littvay |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/oana_ioana-elena.pdf |
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