Collaborative Research on the Intermediation Process and Political Decision Making

当代民主国家的公民主要根据亲友、媒体和社会团体等政治中间人提供的信息了解政治并作出政治决定。本研究探讨了1992年美国总统大选中的中介过程。研究人员采用混合研究设计，将密集的地方性研究与全国性研究相结合。在地方和国家研究中，将对公民及其个人讨论者进行抽样调查。他们阅读的报纸的内容也将被分析。此外，当地研究还将审查社区中主要二级组织的活动及其对公民的影响。目前的调查有别于以往的调查，因为它审查了中间人的全部人员，并将公民对调解过程的看法与直接从中间人本身收集的信息结合在一起。此外，这项研究是一项关于调解的五国合作研究的一部分，该研究使调查人员能够将美国的调查结果放在跨国背景下，从而确定先进工业社会中调解的规则和异常。这项研究集中于当代政治行为的几个中心研究问题，并将产生一个中介过程模型，描述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.