Product of our environment: The influence of institutions on the use and effectiveness of voting heuristics.

摘要

This dissertation examines the questions of: 1) Why do individuals use any particular voting shortcut, or heuristic, over another? and 2) What explains conflicting evidence of the usefulness of heuristics for voters? My answer to these questions focuses on the influence of three national level political institutions: the electoral (majoritarian vs. proportional) party (two vs. multi) and governance (presidential vs. parliamentary) systems. I argue that these institutions structure the way individuals think about politics and their electoral choices, driving them to use certain information and heuristics more often. I also argue that institutions, by structuring the voting environment, also influence how useful any particular heuristic will be in that decision context. Thus the usefulness of heuristics is not bound by individual level variables, but rather the context in which they are employed. Answering these questions is crucial to better understanding the decision making process of voters. In order to test this theory I use both experimental and survey data.;Results show that the institutional environment indeed has an effect on what types of heuristics voters use to make their decisions. However, only some of these effects were consistent across the theoretical expectations, experimental results, and survey analysis. When considering the effectiveness of heuristics, findings are even more meager, with no consistent results between the experiment and survey analysis. While the mixed findings signal the need for caution, they provide some signal for the importance of institutions in the way individuals use voting shortcuts. Therefore, as scholars move toward a truly general theory of voting, there needs to be a consideration of how the varieties of democracy and influence voting behavior.