Making Sense of Heuristic Choice in Nonpartisan Elections: Evidence from South Korea

Heuristics are used to compensate for the limitations of human cognitive capacities. However, little is known about how voters decide what cue to use when multiple cues are available. Exploiting the institutional features of elections for the nonpartisan position of superintendent of education in South Korea, we demonstrate that voters may choose an “ecologically rational” heuristic in a given context, taking into account the trade-off between the cognitive costs and the accuracy of inference associated with different cues. Our analysis shows that the three cues—ballot order, partisan color, and ideology —are commonly used in the absence of party labels, and their relative importance varies with the electoral context. In areas with large school-age populations and in races without an incumbent, contexts where the demand for information is conceivably high, the importance of the partisan color cue increases. We further present individual-level evidence suggesting that voters with higher levels of political sophistication and interest rely more on the ideology cue.