The Simple Art of Voting: The Cognitive Shortcuts of Italian Voters

In The Simple Art of Voting, Delia Baldassarri provides a new understanding of how voting works by focusing on how choices are made rather than on what their outcomes are. Drawing on recent advances in cognitive psychology, political cognition, and behavioral economics, Baldassarri distinguishes voters based on the cognitive shortcuts, or heuristics, they use to reduce the complexity of political choice. In doing so, she reveals which factors-parties, leaders, ideology, the media-are most important to different types of voters.