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Heuristics in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2016

David Fortunato  and
Randolph T. Stevenson
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Abstract

A growing literature in political science has pointed to the importance of heuristics in explaining citizens’ political attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. At the same time, the multidisciplinary research on heuristics in general has revealed that individuals seem to use heuristics sensibly—applying them (perhaps subconsciously) when they are likely to be helpful but not otherwise. We extend this multidisciplinary work to political behavior and present a general theory of contextual variation in political heuristic use applied to discover under what conditions (i.e., what political contexts) voters will use a partisanship heuristic to infer the legislative votes of their legislators in imperfectly disciplined voting contexts. More specifically, we predict that US constituents of loyal partisan senators will use the partisanship heuristic more often than constituents of less loyal senators. Our empirical analysis reveals strong support for our theory, contributing to our understanding of political heuristics in general and adding nuance to our understanding of the partisanship heuristic in particular.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , April 2019 , pp. 311 - 330
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

David Fortunato, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, 2010 Allen Building, 4348 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4348 (fortunato@tamu.edu). Randolph T. Stevenson, Professor, Department of Political Science, Rice University, 105 Herzstein Hall, 6100 Main St. Houston, TX 77005-1827 (stevenso@rice.edu).

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