Political Perceptions, Political Preferences and their Role in Decision-Making Environments

Abstract

Political participation aims at improving the level and quality of involvement and responsibility of political and institutional decision-making in democratic societies. Political preference dynamics as well as opinion dynamics research often emphasizes how this influences the political attitude dynamics toward decision-making agents and institutions. Political parties, elite and citizens view their political participation as a way of activating and making operational those democratic mechanisms which allow for expressing – directly or indirectly, openly or by intermediary means – their own political preferences and expectations with regard to governmental decision-making and policy-making. How political participation could enhance and/or reinforce the activation and operation of democratic mechanisms is closely tied to mechanisms of social and political dynamics covering most diverse aspects from compliance with group behaviour to the construction of political and social consensus, political legitimacy, institutional authority and trust. Advanced data-driven, big data, and web research methodologies reveal the impact of various forms and means of political expression of preferences onto the type and quality of political participation. New political narratives reveal their complex impact on institutional and social network dynamics. Citizens perceptions of trust and institutional legitimacy is often a complex political construction based on both the imaginary of a political culture and on the emergence of epistemic dimensions of social communities. Preference falsification research reveals strong potential in exploring the opinion dynamics in relation to unanimity and majority opinion emergence, and also in relation to social influence and attitude change dynamics. Preference falsification has also been investigated as a mechanism of formation of dual opinions in close relation to the culture of public expression in the ex-communist societies of the Central and Eastern Europe, where value (normative) dissonance explains the gap between freedom and fear of expression in these societies. This panel aims at investigating and discussing theoretical and methodological research which allows for a better understanding of decision making with reference to mechanisms of cognitive and/or normative (value) dissonance, preference falsification, consensus, legitimacy and trust in complex processes of social influence and political propaganda.