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Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations

Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Journal of Political Science Wiley

Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations

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Publisher
Wiley
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
ISSN
0092-5853
eISSN
1540-5907
DOI
10.1111/j.0092-5853.2004.00084.x
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Attitude strength is an important, but contested, subject in social psychology. Political scientists often rely on measures of attitude strength such as attitude importance, accessibility, or certainty in their work while ignoring the politically meaningful differences across types of strength. This omission is particularly relevant in the discussion of the formation of candidate evaluations. The research reported here indicates that accessibility is not the relevant type of attitude strength when describing how voters use issues in evaluating candidates. Instead, voters' reliance on issues when evaluating candidates depends on the voter's certainty about where the candidates stand. Given the different antecedents of certainty and accessibility, this result suggests that that citizens are able to more carefully process and use information available to them during an election campaign than would be expected by the prevailing theories of attitude formation.

Journal

American Journal of Political Science – Wiley

Published: Jul 1, 2004

References

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    Bassili, Bassili
  • Editor's Introduction
    Bassili, Bassili
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    Gelman, Gelman; King, King
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  • Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates
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    Miller, Miller; Krosnick, Krosnick
  • Theoretical and Empirical Implications of Attitude Strength
    Miller, Miller; Peterson, Peterson
  • Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Controversy and its Effect on Tolerance
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