The Unresolved Democratic Dilemma: Information, Cues- and Ignorance

Many scholars in the recent years have argued that it does not matter so much that many voters are very badly informed about politics because they can use information shortcuts and heuristic cues to overcome the lack of information and still make a reasoned choice. This idea of low information rationality, although nice in theory, is not supported by em-pirical analysis. This paper shows that the level of information is positively related to dif-ferent cues and heuristics and not the other way around: voters with high knowledge and high levels of information make use of heuristics more often than badly informed voters too. Some voters may use cues such as party attachment for their decision however there remains a large group of voters which are both badly informed and don’t use cues. In addition well-informed voters do not always have the same political preferences or make the same political choices as badly informed voters. 1 1 Is there low information rationality? Many studies on voting behaviour have found low political knowledge of citizen