The Responsive Voter: Campaign Information and the Dynamics of Candidate Evaluation

We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American political science review 1995-06, Vol.89 (2), p.309-326
Main Authors: Lodge, Milton, Steenbergen, Marco R., Brau, Shawn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Campaigns
Candidate
Candidates
Cognitive Psychology
Correlation
Electioneering
Elections
Electoral campaigning
Electoral Process
Evaluation
Forgetting
Information processing
Longitudinal Studies
Memory
Memory decay
Modeling
MODELING, MODELS
Negative campaigning
Normativity
POLITICAL BEHAVIOR
POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS
Political candidates
Political information
Political participation
Political science
Politics
Public opinion
Recall
Resistance (Psychology)
Social Psychology
Summarization
U.S.A
United States
USAGE OF INFORMATION
Voters
VOTING
Voting Behavior
Voting behaviour
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Summary:We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events. Over time people forget most of the campaign information they are exposed to but are nonetheless able to later recollect their summary affective evaluation of candidates which they then use to inform their preferences and vote choice. These findings have substantive, methodological, and normative implications for the study of electoral behavior. Substantively, we show how campaign information affects voting behavior. Methodologically, we demonstrate the need to measure directly what campaign information people actually attend to over the course of a campaign and show that after controling for the individual's on-line assessment of campaign messages, National Election Study-type recall measures prove to be spurious as explanatory variables. Finally, we draw normative implications for democratic theory of on-line processing, concluding that citizens appear to be far more responsive to campaign messages than conventional recall models suggest.
ISSN:0003-0554
1537-5943
DOI:10.2307/2082427