Content area
Abstract
This is a study of how people process political information and make sense of politics. In order to cut information costs, people often infer information from preexisting default values, especially on low-cost, low benefit matters such as political affairs. As a result of this inference process, there is significant amount of misinformation in the electorate. People think about politics with the most accessible schema, which I suggest is the personal character of the candidates.
Empirically, I analyze the relative importance of policy considerations, candidate personality assessments, and partisanship in the presidential selection process. In constructing my statistical models, I utilize developments in information processing theory to construct variables that conform to the on-line information processing assumption. Previous studies using open-ended questions to operationalize candidate assessments may underestimate their effects. I find that for the whole electorate, the personal characteristics of candidates have the most effect of the three schemata under examination, and there is a strong indirect influence of candidate assessment on policy considerations through projection and persuasion effects.
Moreover, political sophistication does matter. Those who are politically sophisticated rely more on policy considerations, and their perceived policy positions of candidates are not affected by candidates' personal traits. On the other hand, people with low sophistication rely mainly on candidate personality evaluation, and that evaluation also affects their policy considerations. Finally, I try to demonstrate projection effects empirically and present a brief discussion on the measurement of uncertainty, which helps us refine the theory of how people think about politics. Those who are more subjectively certain about their placements of candidates are actually more likely to place the candidates further away from the candidates' mean positions. They are also more likely to think of the issue as more important, and this is probably the reason why they feel the need to obtain a state of conformity between the candidate's position and their own, which makes their perceptions of the candidates' positions less accurate.
