Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Policy Uncertainly and Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations

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How can the electorate reach a reasonable decision in elections, when voters, individually, appear so uninformed and uninterested? Existing micro-level theories of candidate evaluations and campaigns cannot account for aggregate learning and election results. I propose a model of candidate evaluation that incorporates a social-psychological understanding of attitude strength that demonstrates how voters learn and use information about candidates. It begins with the premise that voters separate their views of candidates into an evaluation of the candidate's policy positions and character traits, and the policy dimension is causally prior to the personal. This relationship, however, is mediated by how certain voters are about the policy positions of the candidates. Specifically, the policy positions of the candidate exert a greater influence over the perceptions of candidate character for those who are more certain. As a voter learns more, as the policy attitude becomes stronger, its influence over both the personality dimension and the overall evaluation grows. This thesis is tested in two ways. First, I use three types of National Election Studies - standard cross sections (1980 through 1996), the 1980 Major Panel Study, and the 1984 Continuous Monitoring Survey. Finally, the underlying mechanism is isolated using an original experiment.