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

Abstract

Attitude importance is a key variable in most models seeking to explain evaluations of political parties and leaders. Unlike attitudes on less central issues, attitudes about aspects of politics which citizens deem personally important are expected to influence their political judgments. In this article, we propose to conceptualize the importance of attitudes as their accessibility in memory and measure it by the time survey respondents take to answer an attitude question. We apply this framework to the way in which issue attitudes (opinions on Europe, immigration, etc.) influence party evaluations in the context of the 2011 Swiss parliamentary elections. As expected, quicker responses tend to be associated with stronger relationships between issue opinions and party evaluations. Promises and limits of this approach to conceptualizing attitude importance are discussed.