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Journal ArticleDOI

Rationalization and Derivation Processes in Survey Studies of Political Candidate Evaluation

Wendy M. Rahn, +2 more
- 01 Aug 1994 - 
- Vol. 38, Iss: 3, pp 582-600
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TLDR
This paper found that voters' reports of the reasons for their preferences were principally rationalizations, especially strong among politically involved voters and those with little exposure to the media, and that voters derived their preferences from likes and dislikes rather than the reasons that give rise to them.
Abstract
In order to assess the determinants of voters' candidate preferences, some analysts have examined responses to open-ended questions that ask citizens what might make them vote for or against a particular candidate. However, psychological theory and research suggest that the success of these reports in predicting voting may be because they reflect rationalizations of preferences rather than the reasons that give rise to them. And indeed, using data from a panel survey conducted during the 1990 elections in Ohio, we found that voters' reports of the reasons for their preferences were principally rationalizations. Rationalization was especially strong among politically involved voters and those with little exposure to the media. Derivation of preferences from likes and dislikes was most pronounced among voters who made up their minds late in the campaign. These findings support the on-line model of voter decision making and suggest that open-ended questions asking voters about their likes and dislikes are not well suited to revealing the real reasons for their preferences.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Media Framing of a Civil Liberties Conflict and Its Effect on Tolerance

TL;DR: This paper examined how local television news outlets framed a specific, dramatic event: a demonstration and rally by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in a small Ohio city, and explored the effect of alternative news frames for this event on tolerance for KKK activities.
Journal ArticleDOI

Agenda-Setting, Priming, and Framing Revisited: Another Look at Cognitive Effects of Political Communication

TL;DR: This article revisited agenda-setting, priming, and framing as distinctively different approaches to effects of political communication and argued against more recent attempts to subsume all three approaches under the broad concept of agenda setting and for a more careful explication of the concepts and of their theoretical premises and roots in social psychology and political psychology.
Book

The Rationalizing Voter

TL;DR: This paper developed and tested a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning, and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Responsive Voter: Campaign Information and the Dynamics of Candidate Evaluation

TL;DR: This paper found strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events.
Book

How Voters Decide: Information Processing During Election Campaigns

TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a paradigm shifting framework for studying voter decision making, and propose a new normative focus for the scientific study of voting behavior: we should care about not just which candidate received the most votes, but also how many citizens voted correctly - in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.
References
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Book

A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

TL;DR: Cognitive dissonance theory links actions and attitudes as discussed by the authors, which holds that dissonance is experienced whenever one cognition that a person holds follows from the opposite of at least one other cognition that the person holds.
Book

The psychology of interpersonal relations

TL;DR: The psychology of interpersonal relations as mentioned in this paper, The psychology in interpersonal relations, The Psychology of interpersonal relationships, کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)
Journal ArticleDOI

Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.

TL;DR: In this paper, it was shown that people are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that influenced a response, unaware of its existence, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response.
Book

The Measurement of Meaning

TL;DR: In this article, the authors deal with the nature and theory of meaning and present a new, objective method for its measurement which they call the semantic differential, which can be adapted to a wide variety of problems in such areas as clinical psychology, social psychology, linguistics, mass communications, esthetics, and political science.