How Voters Decide: Information Processing in Election Campaigns

Richard R. Lau · David P. Redlawsk

Jun 2006 · Cambridge University Press

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This book attempts to redirect the field of voting behavior research by proposing a paradigm-shifting framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented for getting 'inside the heads' of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information from modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad theoretically-defined types of decision strategies that voters employ to help decide which candidate to support are described and operationally-defined. Individual and campaign-related factors that lead voters to adopt one or another of these strategies are examined. Most importantly, this research proposes 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 - that is, in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.

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Richard Lau is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Study of Democracy in the Political Science Department at Rutgers University. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. He has published in all of the major journals in political science and social psychology, and recently wrote (with Gerald Pomper) Negative Campaigning: An Analysis of U.S. Senate Elections (2004).

David P. Redlawsk is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. Prior to completing his Ph.D. and arriving at the University of Iowa in 1999, Redlawsk spent nearly ten years in the technology industry, managing information systems for colleges, and working as a management consultant. As a political scientist, he has published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics and Political Psychology, among others. He twice received the Roberta Sigel Best Paper Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. He co-edited Hate Speech on Campus: Cases, Commentary, and Case Studies (1997) with Milton Heumann and Thomas Church, and is currently completing an edited volume on emotion in politics to be published in 2006. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.