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2 See Miller, Arthur H., Wattenberg, Martin P. and Malanchuk, Oksana, “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986), 521–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 This point is well illustrated by Shabad and Andersen in their review of the literature concerning gender differences in “candidate orientation.” See Shabad, Goldie and Andersen, Kristi, “Candidate Evaluations by Men and Women,” Public Opinion Quarterly 43 (1979), 19–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10 In its relatively short history, the term “schema” has been used to identify a number of different theoretical structures, depending on the theorist. Those applying the concept to political cognition have been somewhat more consensual in this respect than their colleagues in social and cognitive psychology. Political scientists have used the term to refer to a perceiver's knowledge structure with regard to a subject. As such, its meaning is captured in part by the more established concepts of “implicit personality theory” and “stereotype,” but it is intended to have more general application than either of these concepts. For a discussion of the concept's development and use in social psychology, see Shelly E. Taylor and Jennifer Crocker, “Schematic Bases of Social Information Processing,” in Higgins, E. Tory, Herman, C. Peter and Zanna, Mark P. (eds.), Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981), 89–134Google Scholar. For a review of its use in the political cognition literature see Lau, Richard R. and Sears, David O., “Social Cognition and Political Cognition: The Past, the Present and the Future,” in Lau and Sears, Political Cognition, 247–66.Google Scholar

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14 See for example Herstein, John A., “Keeping the Voter's Limits in Mind: A Cognitive Process Analysis of Decision Making in Voting,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40 (1981), 843–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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16 Fiske, , “Schema-Based versus Piecemeal Politics,” 50–51.Google Scholar

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19 Ibid., 217.

20 See Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates” as well as Lau, Richard R. and Erber, Ralph, “Political Sophistication: An Information- Processing Perspective,” in Kraus, Sidney and Perloff, Richard M. (eds.), Mass Media and Political Thought (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985), 37–64Google Scholar; or Eric Smith, R. A. N., “The Levels of Conceptualization: False Measures of Ideological Sophistication,” American Political Science Review 74 (1980), 685–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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22 In each of these surveys, identical “like-dislike” questions were asked about each of the major party leaders contesting the election. The format of these questions was as follows: “Now we would like to ask you about your impressions of the various leaders of the federal political parties, (a) Is there anything in particular that you LIKE about (leader's name)? … Anything else? (b) Is there anything in particular that you DISLIKE about (leader's name)? … Anything else?” Use of these open-ended responses for our analyses has both advantages and disadvantages. One drawback is that they provide an incomplete picture of most respondents’ cognitive images because they represent only the most salient positive and negative features of each image. More than offsetting this limitation, however, is the fact that open-ended responses are much less contaminated by the demand characteristics of the interview situation. Given that we are concerned largely with exploring the respondent's frame of reference, requiring respondents to define their own context of evaluation is a critical feature. For descriptions of the sampling designs used in these studies see Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada, 397–400, regarding 1974; and Lambert, Ronald D., Brown, Steven D., Curtis, James E., Kay, Barry J. and Wilson, John M., 1984 Canadian National Election Study Codebook (Waterloo, Ontario, 1986) regarding 1984.Google Scholar

23 See, for example, Miller, Arthur H. and Miller, Warren E., “Ideology in the 1972 Election: Myth or Reality—A Rejoinder,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976), 832–49; or Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 To compare these leadership “visibility” rates with those found in the United States, see Kinder, Donald R. and Sears, David O., “Public Opinion and Political Action,” in Lindzey, Gardner and Aronson, Elliot (eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2 (3rd ed.; Cambridge: Knopf, 1985), 659–741.Google Scholar

25 It should be noted that in all but the 1984 survey only a random half of each sample was asked the leader “like-dislike” sequence of questions. For a description of the individual images of leaders in the 1974 survey, see Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada, chap. 7; and for the 1979 and 1980 surveys, see Clarke et al., Absent Mandate, chap. 5.

26 For an analysis of earlier American studies on this point see Kagay, Michael R. and Caldeira, Greg A., “I Like the Looks of his Face: Elements of Electoral Choice, 1952–1972,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1975; for a recent update, see Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates.”Google Scholar

27 See , Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada, 224.Google Scholar

28 Lau, Richard R., “Political Schemata, Candidate Evaluations, and Voting Behavior,” in Lau and Sears, Political Cognition, 95–126. In this discussion Lau defines the substantive orientations or dimensions that organize political thought in terms of the various political schemata that the citizen may possess. While the schema notion may well apply to categories or dimensional thinking in this way, we will avoid confusion by reserving usage in this study to “person” and “role schemata.”Google Scholar

29 Kinder, Donald R., “Presidential Character Revisited,” paper presented to the nineteenth annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, May 1984.Google Scholar

30 In this analysis each of the four “cluster” variables for each leader has a potential range of zero to six reflecting the possibility that respondents could use attributes from that cluster for each of their three “likes” and each of their three “dislikes.” For this and all subsequent analyses, findings are based on and reported for the Liberal, Progressive Conservative and New Democratic party leaders only. The Créditiste leaders, Caouette (1974) and Roy (1979 and 1980), have been excluded primarily because of their low public visibility resulting in little variation in each of the dependent measures. Caouette's name elicited comments from 46 per cent of the 1974 sample while Roy's name elicited comments from 11 per cent of the 1979 sample and 14 per cent of the 1980 sample.

31 In strict methodological terms, factor analysis is not the proper technique for this task in that the four attribute cluster variables for any one leader are not independent of each other. Nevertheless, we employ it here because it summarizes the latent patterns very effectively and the bias introduced by their modest interdependence acts to inhibit rather than to facilitate emergence of the hypothesized and obtained factor structure (that is, factors defined in terms of attribute clusters).

32 A subset of the 1974 sample was reinterviewed in 1979 and 1980 as part of the election studies of those years. With half-sampling for the leader “like-dislike” questions at each point in time, the effective weighted sample size of the 1974–1979 panel was 616, and for the 1979–1980 panel it was 817.

33 For an overview of this body of literature see Hastie, Reid, “Schematic Principles in Human Memory,” in Higgins et al., Social Cognition, 39–88.Google Scholar

34 Lau, , “Political Schemata, Candidate Evaluations, and Voting Behavior,” 104–07.Google Scholar

35 Miller, et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” 528–29.Google Scholar

36 The 1974 and 1979 surveys included a sequence of open-ended questions regarding respondents' likes and dislikes toward each political party. The format of these questions was identical to that used for the leader “like-dislike” sequence (see note 22, above). The “verbosity” measure employed here is the total number of comments offered by each respondent about all three parties. In the 1974–1979 comparisons, the 1974 party “like-dislike” sequence has been used; in the 1979–1980 comparisons, the 1979 sequence has been used.

37 Fiske, Susan T., Kinder, Donald R. and Larter, W. Michael, “The Novice and the Expert: Knowledge-Based Strategies in Political Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 19 (1983), 381–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 See Converse, , “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” and Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates.”Google Scholar

39 Miller, et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” 530–33.Google Scholar

40 See Converse, , “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”Google Scholar

41 With one exception the variables for each election period have been constructed in a manner consistent with the practice of Miller and his associates: the education variable is trichotomized so that l=less than high school diploma, 2=high school diploma, and 3=at least some post-secondary education; political interest reflects the respondent's answer (l =not much at all, 2=fairly, 3=very) to the question, “Do you pay much attention to politics generally—that is, from day to day, when there isn't a big election campaign going on? Would you say that you follow politics very closely, fairly closely or not much at all?”; partisan intensity reflects the respondent's answer (1 =not very, 2=fairly, 3=very) to the question, “How strongly (party named) do you feel, very strongly, fairly strongly, or not very strongly,” with nonidentifiers coded 1; media usage reflects an average of the responses (l =never, 2 =seldom, 3 =sometimes, 4=often) to the questions: How often do you “read about politics in the newspapers and magazines?,” and “watch programmes about politics on TV?”; finally, with the exception of 1980, verbosity is measured as described in note 36. Since the leader and party “like-dislike” sequences were asked of opposite half-samples in 1980, the 1980 “verbosity” measure has been constructed from respondents' 1979 party evaluations.

42 It might be argued that this test is flawed in that there are actually three measures of expertise involved in the equation—partisan intensity and media exposure as well as political interest—which have distorted the effects of any one or a combination of them. However, analyses not reported here which include only one of these three variables, or a previously unused behavioural measure of involvement, in each case fail to register significant “expertise” effects with education and verbosity controlled.

43 The effect of out-of-role behaviour on the trait attribution process has been well-documented in the attribution literature of the past two decades. For a recent review of that research see Ross, Michael and Fletcher, Garth J. O., “Attribution and Social Perception,” in Lindzey and Aronson, Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2, 73–122.Google Scholar

44 This possibility is discussed in Fiske's analysis of piecemeal and schematic information processing. See Fiske, , “Schema-based versus Piecemeal Politics.”Google Scholar

45 The theoretical basis for this “enrichment” thesis is Kelley, Harold H., Causal Schemata and the Attribution Process (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1972), which develops the analogy between naive information-processing and n-way analysis of variance.Google Scholar

46 See Zajonc, R. B., “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35 (1980), 151–75; and Kinder, “Presidential Character Revisited,” 250–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar