The 2000 Presidential vote is modeled using voter sophistication as a source of heterogeneity. Three measures of sophistication are employed: education, knowledge, and the levels of conceptualization. Interacting them with vote predictors shows little meaningful variation. However, removing the assumption of ordinality from the levels of conceptualization uncovers considerable heterogeneity in the importance of the vote predictors in explaining the vote. Thus, different sophistication measures should not be treated as equivalent, nor combined as if they are equivalent. Few of the issue and candidate components are relevant to those with a less sophisticated understanding of politics. The opposite partisan attachments of the two most sophisticated groups suggest that sophistication's impact on the vote can be confounded by partisanship.Keywords Voter sophistication Á Level of conceptualization Á 2000 presidential election Á Vote models Á Education effects Á Political knowledge How does political sophistication affect voting behavior? As Lavine and Gschwend (2007) summarize, the prevailing literature contends that the ''…capacity for ideological thought conditions how citizens perceive and evaluate objects in the political world. Whereas sophisticates are attuned to the abstract liberal/conservative character of political debate, non-sophisticates respond to political stimuli using simpler and more proximal (i.e. object-specific) considerations.'' Studies also routinely find that models predict the vote better for sophisticates (e.g. Stimson

This study uses an experimental design to simulate the ballot counting process during a hand-recount after a disputed election. Applying psychological theories of motivated reasoning to the political process, we find that ballot counters' party identification conditionally influences their ballot counting decisions. Party identification's effect on motivated reasoning is greater when ballot counters are given ambiguous, versus specific, instructions for determining voter intent. This study's findings have major implications for ballot counting procedures throughout the United States and for the use of motivated reasoning in the political science literature.

This article establishes that transitions of power from one presidential administration to the next can act as a source of uncertainty regarding whom citizens view as responsible for national conditions. I argue that citizens confront this ambiguity in a partisan manner when making responsibility attributions of credit and blame. Using the economy and the Iraq War as examples, ordinary partisans frequently ascribe responsibility using motivated reasoning by crediting the president of their own political party for perceived successes and blaming the president of the opposite party for perceived failures.

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