How does one’s information processing and cognitive style affect policy acceptance and compliance? This research proposes to look at how one’s cognitive style and political preference pair up for policy acceptance and compliance, that usually mediates with government trust. There is a myth in Korea that citizens with certain sets of policy preferences (for example, preferring universal welfare plan) are emotional rather than rational. Particularly with the rise of new media (and Internet), communication between governments and the public has been changing rapidly. The public expects more communication and information exchange with governments. This calls for more research on how the public process the information, given their cognitive biases.
Thus, the goal of this research is to employ the approach of behavioral public administration to look at information processing and decision making of citizens, and to examine the dynamics of cognitive biases combined with socio-economic and political preference variables, when there are new policies are taking their places. For instance, a new tax file amendment of the year 2015 in Korea caused a nationwide resistance from the public, due to poor policy PR and new media effect. Recent studies about conflict resolution and citizen participation also point the importance of government PR to increase government trust.
To measure information processing and cognitive styles, we utilize Arceneaux & Wielen (2013)’s measurement tool. They developed a measurement tool, indexing degrees of “feeling vs thinking” (need for affect, NFA & need for cognition, NFC). We utilize existing measure of government trust, policy compliance. We will also add a small scale sentiment analysis to see the effect of new media on policy compliance, in addition to the quantitative measures (survey). This research will contribute to the literature, theoretically, by adding cognitive style measure from political psychology to look at the policy acceptance and government trust. Practically, this research may contribute to better-understand citizens in changing environment (new media, polarization, & new political parties in Korea) to possibly increase positive communication between governments and citizens.
