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

当选民个人看起来如此无知和不感兴趣时，选民如何在选举中做出合理的决定？现有的候选人评估和竞选的微观理论无法解释总体学习和选举结果。我提出了一个候选人评估模型，该模型结合了对态度强度的社会心理理解，展示了选民如何学习和使用关于候选人的信息。它始于这样一个前提，即选民将他们对候选人的看法分为对候选人的政策立场和性格特征的评价，政策维度是因果关系优先于个人因素。然而，这种关系是通过某些选民对候选人的政策立场的看法来调节的。具体地说，候选人的政策立场对那些更确定的人对候选人性格的看法产生了更大的影响。随着选民学到的越多，政策态度越强，其对个性维度和整体评价的影响就会增加。这篇论文从两个方面进行了检验。首先，我使用了三种类型的国家选举研究--标准横截面(1980-1996)、1980年的主要小组研究和1984年的连续监测调查。最后，通过一个原始的实验分离出潜在的机制。

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.