Award Information
The goal of this project is to assess how voters obtain and use information about candidates during electoral campaigns in what I call a Complex Electoral Environment. By Complex Electoral Environment (CEE) I'm referring to a context where either some or all of the following factors exist; voters weakly identify with parties, there are several parties, districts have more than one-seat in dispute, and many candidates run for the same office. The main hypothesis is that in CEEs, the more competition there is, the harder it is for voters to deal with the overload of fragmented information about candidates coming from the political system. A variety of techniques will be used to collect data on how voters obtain and use information made available by different mechanisms of information diffusion during the 2002 elections for the Chamber of Deputies in two Brazilian cities that vary in the complexity of their electoral environments.