Attitudes toward Presidential Candidates and Political Parties

Initial Optimism, Inertial First Impressions, and a Focus on Flaws

Bibliographic Data

ID6232345
AuthorsAllyson L Holbrook, Jon A Krosnick (0000-0003-0336-1613), Penny S Visser, Wendi L Gardner (0009-0002-9083-2996), John T Cacioppo (0000-0002-0049-3509)
Year2001
Volume45
Issue4
Pages930
Publication date2001-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0092-5853 • E-ISSN: 1540-5907
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2669333
OpenAlexW2312546575
LanguageEN
Citations received59
References cited38

Most models of how citizens combine information about political candidates into attitudes toward them presume that symmetric linear additive processes are at work. We propose a model (called the ANM) in which the impact of favorable and unfavorable beliefs on attitudes is asymmetric and nonlinear. Cross-sectional national survey data (from 1972 to 1996) show that this model describes attitudes toward presidential candidates and political parties better than a symmetric linear model (SLM) among respondents high and low in political involvement. Longitudinal survey data (collected between 1980 and 1996) show that attitudes are derived from favorable and unfavorable beliefs in ways consistent with the ANM. And the ANM revealed that voter turnout is enhanced by a stronger preference for a citizen's preferred candidate if at least one candidate is disliked, whereas the SLM failed to detect this effect. These findings have important implications for understanding the impact of election campaigns on citizens' preferences and actions and for understanding the ingredients of vote choices. olitics is, at its core, a process of forming and expressing preferences. When democratic citizens vote to elect representatives or terrorists detonate bombs to demand a voice in government policy making or insurgents attempt to overthrow a dictatorship, these political actors have opinions about what they consider to be good or bad and are expressing those attitudes through significant and consequential actions. Thus, to fully understand the workings of politics, we must understand how political actors form the attitudes that direct their conduct. During this century, numerous scholars have explored the origins of political attitude formation in one particular domain: democratic elections. And in fact, most scholars of voting have shared a vision of the process by which citizens derive their evaluations of candidates. Whether manifested explicitly in discussions of information processing (e.g., Kelley 1983; Kelley and Mirer 1974) or implicitly in hundreds of linear regression equations estimated over the years (for a review, see Kinder 1998), we have presumed

Democracy · Economics · Government (linguistics · Microeconomics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Preference · Presidential election · Presidential system · Public relations · Sociology · Survey data collection · Voting · Voting behavior · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Media Influence and Politics · Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence · Psychology · Social Psychology

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