Epistemic political socialization: the contribution of rational systems theory to the study of dissonance-provoked processes

The article is devoted to the study of epistemic political socialization from the perspective of the theory of cognitive dissonance, refined by the author’s concept of rational systems. Rational dissonance in this article is understood as rational-semantic, adding the significance of information to a number of the most important variables. The novelty of this approach lies not only in the study of the socializing role of cognitive dissonance, but also in the use of rational systems theory as a heuristics for scientific theory as such.