Surviving Information Overload: How Elite Politicians Select Information
基于对比利时14位政党领袖和部长的访谈，提出精英政治家筛选信息的类型学和漏斗模型，揭示他们如何通过外包、经验法则和自信来应对信息过载。
Information in politics is overabundant. Especially elite politicians are bombarded with information. Politicians must be selective to stay on top of the information torrent. Aggregate‐level work within the bounded rationality framework showed that information selection is at the core of decision making. Yet, an answer to the question as to how individual elite politicians go about selecting information is lacking. We know that they unavoidably do, but how exactly they perform this selection task remains largely unknown. The article draws on interviews with 14 party leaders and ministers in Belgium about their information processing. We present a typology, and a funnel, of consecutive information selection mechanisms and attitudes. Politicians partially outsource their information selection to procedures and/or staffers, they personally apply rigorous rules of thumb about what to attend to and what not, and they compensate the pressure and constant risk of messing up with a large dose of self‐confidence.