Election campaign and media exposure: explaining objective vs subjective political knowledge among first-time voters

ABSTRACT

Existing research reveals the existence of objective (factual) and subjective (perceived) political knowledge among voters. However, we know little about their determinants, especially among people who have not voted before. This article aims to explain the factors influencing the objective and subjective political knowledge of first-time voters. Our analysis uses individual level data from an original survey conducted in the aftermath of the 2019 presidential elections in Romania on 664 first-time voters. The study distinguishes between three components of knowledge – motivation, ability and opportunity – and argues that they may have divergent effects. The empirical evidence based on ordinal logistic regression only partially supports these theoretical expectations, but it does reveal a rich picture.

KEYWORDS:

• Political knowledge
• first-time voters
• interest
• campaign

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Apart from the controls included in the analysis, we also tested the effect of other variables that could have influenced voters’ objective or subjective knowledge. Some of these variables are urban/rural residence, living with parents, and gender. There is no empirical support for any of these variables. Consequently, we do not report the findings here, in order to keep the statistical models parsimonious.

2. Co-habitation in Romania has a history marked by conflicts between the country’s president and prime-minister, who share the executive power. For details of previous conflicts, see Gherghina and Mișcoiu (2013) and Raunio and Sedelius (Raunio and Sedelius 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sergiu Gherghina

Sergiu Gherghina is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics, University of Glasgow. His research interests lie in party politics, legislative and voting behavior, democratization, and the use of direct democracy.

Claudiu Marian

Claudiu Marian is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Studies and Contemporary Politics, Babes-Bolyai University Cluj. His research interests are political parties, political marketing and electoral sociology.