Resumen de Going beyond individuals: understanding the influence of the political context on informational shorcuts
This thesis addresses the omission in the literature of how political context influences the performance of informational shortcuts. In line with this research gap, the first article suggests that parliamentarian and party-oriented systems encourage the performance of ideology, party identification and leadership, as their use increases the probability to participate in elections. The second article focus on Spain and two contextual shortcuts - incumbency and electoral polls-. The findings indicate that peripheral voters has the highest propensity to vote for left wing parties when the polls show that the left party is going to win the elections and is the challenger in salient elections or the incumbent in a non-salient election. The third article analyses the Spanish case and the impact of leader evaluations and ideology on vote choice over time. The findings manifest that while ideology becomes more important, the utility of leader evaluation is reduced once the informational context becomes more stable.
