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Cognitive Strategies and Candidate Evaluations

University of Kentucky

Decades of voting behavior studies have found party affiliation, issue stands and ideology, and candidate image to be major factors influencing voter evaluations of candidates. The relative importance of these criteria, however, may depend on the context in which the information processing about the candidate occurs. Specifically, in this study, an experimentally designed survey is used to change the context of the judgment task from an absolute judgment of one candidate to a comparison judgment of two candidates. The results show that subjects changed from a discrete information processing strategy when judging one candidate to a heuristic processing strategy when judging two candidates. The implications for citizen evaluations of political candidates is discussed.

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