Peter Selb

Celina Kacperski, Roberto Ulloa, Peter Selb et al.

As citizens increasingly encounter political information in digital environments, understanding whether this engagement shapes their policy views has become a central concern. Drawing on dual-process theories of persuasion, we argue that motivational activation is an enabling condition for policy support change in high-choice online environments. We test this in a three-wave field experiment with German participants (n = 791) across three policy topics (basic child support, renewable energy transition, cannabis legalization), in which participants were randomly assigned to a control group, and two encouragement conditions: a verbal encouragement, or a monetary incentive tied to a knowledge test. Browsing behavior was passively tracked via digital trace data over a 20-hour window. We find that self-directed online information search produced changes in policy support for child support and cannabis legalization but not for the energy transition, with monetary incentives producing significant effects rather than verbal prompts. We discuss motivational salience, issue malleability, and search-environment quality as joint conditions under which political information engagement can produce detectable changes in policy support.

Roberto Ulloa, Tiedemann Leonard, Peter Selb et al.

Persistent inequalities in political knowledge are a central concern in political communication. We organize the mechanisms underlying the knowledge-gap literature by distinguishing between individual preconditions, structural features of the information environment, and topic characteristics. Within this framework, we note that self-directed information seeking, a prototypical form of intentional exposure, has received little attention despite its importance in navigating today's complex information environment. We conducted a field experiment in Germany combining randomized encouragements and passive browser tracking to examine how individuals with varying education levels acquire policy-specific knowledge through online search. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (verbal encouragement, financial encouragement, or control) to seek information on three salient policy topics differing in divisiveness and complexity (child support, energy transition, and cannabis legalization). We estimate both intention-to-treat (ITT) and local average treatment effects (LATE) of information seeking on post-search knowledge outcomes, with a focus on education and civic knowledge as moderators. While the interventions equalized information-seeking behavior, the results provide some support for the knowledge gap hypothesis: knowledge gains were concentrated among participants with higher education or baseline civic knowledge, who, according to our post-hoc exploratory analyses, appeared more effective at navigating search results. These findings indicate that a narrowing of knowledge inequalities goes beyond motivation: it calls for both individual-level interventions to strengthen citizens' skills and structural-level adaptations to foster more equitable learning environments.