In discussing the results of our experiments so far, we have focused on information – how voters search for it, what type and how much of it they consider – and how information search in turn is affected by the decision environment, such as the number of candidates and the type of election. For a book about what voters do, up until this point we have actually talked very little about politics and voting. Beginning with this chapter, that changes. With what we have now learned about the importance of information processing as a background, we can turn to what, for most voting research, is the raison d'etre – candidate evaluation and choice. In this chapter and the next, we examine how voters evaluate candidates and how they choose among them. But we will not be content with just these traditional concerns. In Chapter 10, we will also consider just how good a job our voters did, and what factors affected their ability to vote correctly. And in Chapter 11 we will turn our attention to political heuristics, a very important topic for a book focusing on information processing. These four chapters will complete our study of the process-oriented framework established in Chapter 2 (and Figure 2.1) for examining the vote choice.

This chapter focuses specifically on candidate evaluation. We have three goals here. First, we want to examine the question of on-line versus memory-based evaluation. This will require a brief review of the relevant psychological and political science literatures.