Information Acquisition and Voting Behaviour (2019-2024)
Abstract
Proper democracies rely on the informed participation of their citizens in the political debate and political institutions. However, keeping informed about the different policy proposals is costly because it requires time and effort. The project aims to understand citizens' decisions to acquire information and how such information affects their voting behaviour. This project would approach this problem theoretically, experimentally and empirically, by creating formal models, testing them through controlled experiments and confirming their validity using real-life data. Understanding how citizens decide to acquire information would help devise policies to reduce polarisation and improve the quality of the political debate and the democracy.
