How do voters seek political information during real-world election campaigns?

This paper examines the dynamics of voter information seeking during real-world election campaigns, a crucial yet relatively underexplored area of political behavior. Drawing on theories of information processing, I propose a model of information seeking driven by the need to resolve informational deficits, shaped by two fundamental party-level characteristics: incumbency status and programmatic change. Firstly, I expect voters to seek information more actively about opposition parties than about governing parties, as the former lack the highly visible track record of governing parties. Secondly, voters tend to seek more information when established non-governing parties undergo a significant programmatic reconfiguration. To empirically test these hypotheses, I compile a unique dataset comprising Google search data related to the main political parties of 11 liberal democracies between 2004 and 2023. The results reveal that voters consistently demonstrate a greater propensity to search for information about opposition parties than incumbent parties during election campaigns, particularly when the opposition implements substantial programmatic changes. These findings have crucial implications for understanding how voters search for political information about political parties in real-world electoral competitions and how party-level characteristics can drive this behavior.