Campaigns and Information Seeking

Abstract

This article explores citizens' political information seeking, which constitutes the `demand side' of political communication during election campaigns. In order to look into what motivates a voter to seek political information, the article formulates a model drawing on ideas from the uses and gratifications tradition, the rational choice framework and the seminal studies of the Columbia and Michigan schools of electoral research. Among the determinants of political information seeking investigated are: social expectations to be politically informed; a personal duty to stay politically informed; a desire to express one's political orientations through voting; and the entertainment aspect of politics. Regarding the dependent variable of campaign information seeking, its overall intensity and the particular sources used (e.g. newspaper, television and radio reports, party political broadcasts, bulletin boards) to gain this information are examined. The article analyses a study of a local German election, which contains a wide variety of measures suitable to test our hypotheses. The empirical analysis shows that campaign information seeking can be explained fairly well ( R2 up to ≈ 22 percent). Among the determinants, social expectations to be politically informed exerted the greatest influence in our model. The influence of the determinants on the specific information sources varies substantially across the different sources. Therefore, explaining the decision to seek particular information sources during an election campaign demands the general model be more specialized.