Ricerc@Sapienza

The present research explores the role of epistemic correlates of voting intentions with respect to the Constitutional Referendum (proposed by the Government) held in Italy on 2016. By combining the motivated-cognition perspective with lay epistemic theory (Kruglanski, 1990), in our study we hypothesized that trust in the Italian Government would determine to vote in favor (vs. against) the Referendum as a function of individuals’ selfascribed epistemic authority (SAEA) and need for cognitive closure (NFC).

The Internet offers new opportunities for the empirical research, especially if we consider that nowadays most citizens are made up of web surfers: on the
one hand, we are seeing the transfer of some traditional methodologies on Internet, on the other hand we are witnessing the development of new
innovative data collection and analysis tools. The study was conducted through a classical survey tool (the questionnaire), using it as part of a web