One of the main areas of my research is the ways in which different types of attitude strength matter for voter decision-making. Attitude strength is a property of an attitude. It defines how impactful, resistant to change, and consistent an attitude is. There are, however, several different concepts that psychologists have referred to as attitude strength; importance, accessibility, uncertainty, and ambivalence being the most common in the Political Science literature.
The first paper in this research stream, “Theoretical and Empirical Implications of Attitude Strength” (co-authored with Joanne Miller), outlines the concept of attitudes strength, noting that there are several different psychological concepts that fall under this general rubric. We argue that it is vital that Political Scientists recognize that they are not interchangeable and that they attend to which type of strength matters when and why.
The next three papers (“Certainty or Accessibility: Attitude Strength in Candidate Evaluations,” “Heterogeneity and Certainty in Candidate Evaluations,” and “Campaign Learning and Vote Determinants”) came out of my dissertation. While there are important differences in the papers, the gist of the work is that uncertainty is the key moderator of issue positions and perceptions of candidate character traits in vote choice.
My most recent paper in this area (“Uncertainty and Campaigns: The Psychological Mechanism Behind Campaign Induced Priming”) directly tests which of three different types of attitude strength (uncertainty, ambivalence, and importance) is responsible for the changes in the weights applied to the determinants of vote choice during a campaign. The results suggest that the key mechanism behind this priming effect is uncertainty.