Functioning democracies require citizens to navigate complex political information environments in order to make decisions that advance their political interests. At the same time limits on cognitive bandwidth, growing government complexity, and the proliferation of high choice media environments make this prohibitively challenging. Individuals must necessarily depend on external resources such as news media, interest groups, social networks, and increasingly, digital platforms that aggregate and curate content. In this proposed dissertation, I present three projects studying how individuals leverage these external resources to remain politically informed, as well as how digital platforms shape the menu of external resources people can access in the first place. In my first paper, I study how political pundits rely on each other to maintain ideological norms and stay up to date in a dynamic political environment. In my second paper, I examine the role Google search plays in the provision of information about elected officials. Third, I propose using web browsing data to study how individual behaviors and platform affordances shape the visibility and quality of online government interactions.