A Matter of Distinction
Candidate Polarization and Information Processing in Election Campaigns
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6179846 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Danny Hayes (0000-0003-1950-1617, Syracuse University, corresponding author), Mathieu Turgeon (0000-0003-0134-4027, University of North Texas) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 38 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 165-192 |
| Publication date | 2010-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Politics Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1532-673X • E-ISSN: 1552-3373 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1532673x09333512 |
| OpenAlex | W2002528387 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 35 |
Because Republican and Democratic elites have polarized in recent decades, American voters increasingly face choices between candidates who hold divergent policy positions. Such a development has potential implications for the way voters process information during campaigns and choose between candidates on election day. Drawing on research in political psychology and using a nationally representative survey-experiment, we argue and find that levels of candidate polarization—the convergence or divergence of candidates’ issue positions—affect voter information consumption, recall of campaign information, and the balance of on-line and memory-based processing employed in the vote decision. In showing that voters faced with more similar candidates rely more heavily on memory-based processing, we provide further support for hybrid models of political information processing and suggest that candidate polarization has consequences for voter attitude strength and resistance to persuasion
Cognitive psychology · Democracy · Economics · Information processing · Motivated reasoning · Persuasion · Political economy · Political psychology · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Public opinion · Public relations · Recall · Sociology · Voting · Voting behavior · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology
What Americans know about politics and why it matters
The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
How Voters Decide
Interpreting Elections
The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line.
Social Cognition and Social Perception
The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics
Social categorization and memory for in-group and out-group behavior
Effects of processing objectives on the recall of prose material
The influence of the level of schema abstractness upon the processing of social information
Processing objectives as a determinant of the relationship between recall and judgment
Memory-based versus on-line processing
Individual and Contextual Variations in Political Candidate Appraisal
A Simple Theory of the Survey Response
Polarization in the American Public
You Must Remember This
Is Polarization a Myth
Ambivalence, Uncertainty, and Processes of Candidate Evaluation
Personifying the State
What Voters Do
Is a Worried Citizen a Good Citizen? Emotions, Political Information Seeking, and Learning via the Internet
Contributions of the Cognitive Approach to Political Psychology
On-line processing in candidate evaluation
No Evidence on Directional vs. Proximity Voting
Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs
Attitude strength and resistance processes
A Partisan Schema for Political Information Processing
The Responsive Voter
An Impression-Driven Model of Candidate Evaluation
A Directional Theory of Issue Voting
Resurgent Mass Partisanship
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,14 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2019 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |