Collaborative Research on the Intermediation Process and Political Decision Making

当代民主国家的公民了解政治并做出政治决定，很大程度上是基于政治中介提供的信息，如亲戚朋友、媒体和社会团体。本研究探讨1992年美国总统选举的中介过程。调查人员采用混合研究设计，将密集的地方研究与国家研究相结合。在地方和国家研究中，将对公民及其个人讨论者进行访谈。他们阅读的报纸内容也会被分析。此外，地方研究将包括审查社区主要二级组织的活动及其对公民的影响。目前的调查与以往的调查不同之处在于，它审查了所有的中介机构，并将公民对中介过程的看法与直接从中介机构收集的信息结合起来。此外，这项研究是五国合作的中介研究的一部分，该研究使研究人员能够将美国的发现置于跨国背景下，从而确定发达工业社会中中介的规律和异常。这项研究是当代政治行为的几个核心研究问题的联系，并将产生一个中介过程的模型，该模型描述了公民与政治世界的关系，以及它如何影响公民选举决策的性质。

Citizens in contemporary democracies learn about politics and make political decisions based largely on the information provided by political intermediaries, such as relatives and friends, the media, and social groups. This research investigation explores the intermediation process in the 1992 American presidential election. The investigators utilize a mixed research design which combines an intensive local study with a national study. In both the local and national studies, interviews will be conducted with a sample of citizens and their personal discussants. The content of the newspapers they read also will be analyzed. The local study, moreover, will include an examination of the activity of key secondary organizations in the community and how it impinges upon citizens. The current investigation is distinguished from prior investigations both in its examination of the full complement of intermediaries and in its merging of citizen perceptions of the intermediation process with information directly collected from the intermediaries themselves. In addition, this research is part of a collaborative five-nation study of intermediation that enables the investigators to place the American findings in a cross- national context, thereby identifying the regularities and anomalies of intermediation within advanced industrial societies. The study lies at the nexus of several of the central research issues of contemporary political behavior and will generate a model of the intermediation process that describes the citizen's relationship to the political world and how it affects the nature of citizen electoral decision making.