ABSTRACT
In the ongoing pursuit to better understand how politics works, scholars regularly explore how the process citizens use to seek, learn, and retain information improves our understanding of why people think, reason, feel, and behave in the ways they do with respect to political choices and outcomes. At its heart, this quest is about political communication: the study of the transmission of information between political actors, the news media, and the public. While social scientists regularly examine why people vote the way they do, their communicative process of decisionmaking, and how they make sense of politics in an increasingly mediated world, it is equally important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of the sources of information scholars use to answer these important questions.
