Information Seeking Behaviour of Voters

Canada has experienced a steady decline in voter turnout for the last several decades. The majority of studies have sought to understand how voters use the information, rather than how they find said information. By analyzing the information behaviour of voters during elections using Wilson’s Revised General Model this paper seeks to understand what information barriers voters experience, and how public libraries can lower these barriers. It finds that there are three points of intervention during voters’ information search; the initial activating mechanism, where the barrier is a lack of political knowledge, the second activating mechanism, where the barrier is a lack of perceived self-efficacy, and the active search phase, where the barrier is access to specific information. Public libraries can intervene at these points by providing electoral information, hosting vote pop-ups or registration workshops, promoting media and civic literacy, and hosting public forums and electoral candidate meet and greets. In doing so, public libraries are in a position to mitigate the declining voter turnout by facilitating information seeking.