ABSTRACT
Every year, political parties spend billions of dollars on electoral campaigns. According to survey data, however, these efforts seem to be useless because voters are found to be generally ill informed about parties, candidates, and issues when asked on election day (e.g., Smith, 1989). In contrast, the results of recent studies on attitude formation in the political domain have given some good reasons to argue that the resources spent on campaigns are not wasted completely. Specically, Lodge, Steenbergen, and Brau (1995) found people to be sensitive to campaign information in that overall evaluations of candidates are adjusted to their online evaluations of individual campaign messages and events. Although people forgot most of the campaign information they had been exposed to over time, their actual preferences and voting choices were found to be informed by their summary evaluations. These effects have been accounted for by an online model of information processing (cf. Hastie & Park, 1986). According to Lodge et al. (1995), people draw politically relevant conclusions from campaign
information about politicians the very moment they process information. These immediate assessments are assumed to be integrated into a “running tally” that reects the summary evaluation of a candidate at any given point in time. Moreover, the running tally is immediately updated and stored in long-term memory, whereas the original campaign information may be forgotten. Subsequent judgments, for example, preceding a vote, are assumed to be based on running tallies rather than on recollections of the original campaign information. This was named the “hot cognition” hypothesis of intuitive voting behavior (Lodge & Taber, 2005). However, one crucial assumption of the running tally model is that it works only if people’s goal is to form an overall impression about a politician.
