Decizia Electorală: Un Exerciţiu Mediat La Români

The purpose of this paper is to use applications of the cognitive psychology in political science. Herbert A. Simon, the well-known American scientist distinguished in 1978 with the Nobel Prize in Economics, has demonstrated that the explanation put forward by political science in relation to the result of political phenomena cannot be based solely on the principle of objective rationality. The solution to supplement this assumption comes for the cognitive psychology and its auxiliary postulates, so that Herbert Simon is able to conclude that explaining and predicting a political phenomenon more accurately are based on a combination between the principle of rationality and auxiliary postulates, which, in most cases, have a dominant role. This paper supports the idea that explaining and predicting the result of electoral voting of Romanians (or of a very large partof them) as accurately as possible rest primarily on the auxiliary postulate of dependence, as a dominant dimension of the psychosocial culture of the Romanians, and identifies the way this postulate is reflected in the political discourse of the winning candidate. The paper uses empirical research to demonstrate the existence of this postulate, concluding that the dominance of the psychosocial culture of dependence accounts for the success of a political candidate whose offer does not allow practically for a cognitive assessment. The acknowledgement of the postulate of dependence as an auxiliary postulate signifies that the principle to be taken into account in an attempt to explain and predict political phenomena (including electoral voting) is the principle of limited rationality.