PolBeRG seminar - Cross-National Variation in Political Knowledge

For the first seminar of the semester we are delighted to have a guest speaker, David Fortunato, from the University of California. David Fortunato is assistant professor in political science at the University of California, Merced. His research focuses on the interaction of institutions and voters on two fronts. The behavioral line emphasizes understanding how people make sense of complex political processes, the tools they use to infer or approximate information that is costly to collect, and how political institutions effect which tools will be employed. The legislative line emphasizes parliamentary organization and responsiveness to voter perceptions and preferences. For more about him, see http://www.davidfortunato.com/ The paper that he will present at PolBeRG belongs to the first category, and deals with how the political context influences people's ability to correctly identify parties' ideological stands in European party systems. The article shows that in countries where the left-right positions of parties are more important predictors of coalition formation, the general population also has a better understanding of the relative positions of parties. Hope to see you at the seminar!