The Cognitive and Affective Components of Political Attitudes: Measuring the Determinants of Candidate Evaluations

Past research suggests that beliefs and emotions operate as partially distinct determinants of political attitudes. In addition, while positive and negative beliefs about a political object are bipolar in structure, positive and negative emotions have been demonstrated to be relatively independent....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Political behavior 1992-12, Vol.14 (4), p.423-442
Main Authors: Ottati, Victor C., Steenbergen, Marco R., Riggle, Ellen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ATTITUDES
Candidate
Emotion
Emotional adjustment
Emotional expression
Evaluation
Measurement
Memory
Political Attitudes
POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
Political candidates
Political ideologies
Political research
POLLS (ALL TYPES)
PUBLIC OPINION
Questionnaires
Social psychology
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Summary:Past research suggests that beliefs and emotions operate as partially distinct determinants of political attitudes. In addition, while positive and negative beliefs about a political object are bipolar in structure, positive and negative emotions have been demonstrated to be relatively independent. In this past research, beliefs and emotions have been assessed with different measures. Yet current models of survey responding suggest that responses to survey items are often influenced by the manner in which the researcher poses the questions. As such, it is not clear whether the uniqueness of these belief and emotion measures reflects a bona fide difference between two underlying constructs, or merely an artifactual difference induced by differing methods of measurement. In this study, beliefs and emotions are shown to operate as partially unique predictors of candidate evaluation even when employing corresponding methods of measurement. The independence of positive and negative emotion, however, only arises when employing a dichotomous measure. When employing ordinal measures, positive and negative emotions contain a substantial component of bipolarity. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
ISSN:0190-9320
1573-6687
DOI:10.1007/BF00992043