Campaign Effects on the Accessibility of Party Identification

Abstract

This study uses response latency, the time required for a survey respondent to formulate an answer upon hearing a question, to examine the accessibility of partisan self-identifications over the course of a political campaign season. Although the aggregate distribution of partisanship remains fairly stable during the campaign, party identifications become more accessible to individuals with weaker party identifications as the election approaches. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the authors find that partisan orientations are more useful in forming political judgments when those orientations are more accessible to the voter. The effect of partisanship on vote choice is a third greater for voters with highly accessible party identifications than for those with less accessible party identifications.

Collecting Paradata for Measurement Error Evaluations

“…For "hidden" questions, interviewers are instructed to press a key (e.g., (1)) when they finish reading a question and then press a key (e.g., (1)) when the respondent begins his/her answer. These "hidden" questions add variables to the dataset recording the time of each of these events, but are not read to the respondent (Johnson, 2004;Grant et al, 2010). "Latent timers," as opposed to the more costly "active" interviewer-generated timers, include time for the interviewer reading the question, the time respondents spend thinking about the answer, questions, clarifications, and rapport behaviors, and the respondent's answer (Mulligan et al, 2003), and are identical to those discussed above for CAPI surveys.…”

The Moderating Impact of Social Networks on the Relationships Among Core Values, Partisanship, and Candidate Evaluations

“…Individual characteristics are not, however, the only determinants of attitudes and behavior. From the earliest studies of political behavior, it was argued that context was important (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, ; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, ), and a large body of American and comparative research demonstrates that contextual factors influence political attitudes and behavior (e.g., Dalton & Anderson, ; Grant, Mockabee, & Monson, ; Huckfeldt, Levine, Morgan, & Sprague, ; Huckfeldt, Sprague, & Levine, ; Rohrschneider & Loveless, ). In this study, we focus on social networks as an important contextual influence on individually held values and attitudes.…”

The Psychology of Quick and Slow Answers: Issue Importance in the 2011 Swiss Parliamentary Elections

“…An election campaign can certainly do that, at least among certain categories of voters (Grant et al. ). However, attitude importance also tends to trigger mechanisms of selective exposure and selective elaboration of received information (Boninger et al.…”