Black-Box Models of Candidate Evaluation

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Black-Box Models of Candidate EvaluationAuthor(s): Milton Lodge, Patrick Stroh, John WahlkeSource: Political Behavior, Vol. 12, No. 1, Cognition and Political Action (Mar., 1990), pp. 5-18Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/586282

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Political Behavior, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1990

BLACK-BOXODELS F CANDIDATEEVALUATIONMiltonLodge,Patrick troh, nd John Wahike

All contemporary models of candidate evaluation are memory-based models in that theytreat the direction and strength of evaluation as a function of the mix of positively andnegatively valued (valenced) information retrieved from memory. Yet, oddly enough,despite the assumption that memory mediates judgment, none of the major models looks atthe processes involved in what information voters recall and how that evidence wasintegrated into a summary evaluation. In this sense then, political science models of votechoice are black-box models: They are silent about how voters actually go aboutinterpreting information and integrating the "evidence" into a summary evaluation of thecandidates. In this article we critique the major political science models, call attention tothe implicit assumptions they make about what "evidence" is assumed to be in memory,and conclude with an argument for introducing process into our explanations of votechoice.

Almost forty years ago Samuel Eldersveld (1951), in the earliest generalcommentary on voting behavior research, wondered "Why is ourknowledge of the voting process still so limited and speculative?" (p. 267).The body of research he surveyed included works by some of the emergingleaders of what soon became known as the "behavioral revolution inpolitical science"; for example, see Tingsten (1937), Gosnell (1930, 1942),and Anderson and Davidson (1943). All but one of the twenty-five worksEldersveld surveyed were based mainly on official election statisticsaggregated by precincts, counties, and states. These studies focused onquestions about voting turnout, the relative proportion of independent andparty-line voting, or the division of the aggregate vote between, say,different economic interests. Few were guided by hypotheses, let alonetheory, of any kind; most were particularistic descriptions of particularelections in particularjurisdictions.In the next major analytic commentary on the subject, Rossi (1959)

Milton Lodge, Department of Political Science, SUNY at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, N.Y.11794. Patrick Stroh, New York University. John Wahlke, University of Arizona.

50190-9320/90/0300-0005$06.00/0 ? 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation


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LODGE,TROH,NDWAHLKEidentified as "landmarks in voting research" The People's Choice(Lazarsfeld,Berelson, and Gaudet, 1944), and its follow-up study, Voting,(Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, 1954), as well as the first majorvoting-behavior publication of the University of Michigan's SurveyResearch Center, The Voter Decides (Campbell, Gurin, and Miller, 1954).All three works applied sophisticated survey research techniques to thestudy of voting behavior. For many researchers, the burgeoning stream oflarge-scale, systematic survey studies of voting that rapidly ensuedpromised a correspondingly rapid advance in knowledge about voting andelections.But today, thirty years after Rossi's optimistic appraisal,few scholars aresatisfied with the cumulative record in the voting behavior field. Many ofus, we suspect, share Natchez' (1985) assessment that voting research hasyet to yield a widely accepted body of middle- or high-level empiricalgeneralizations, let alone any generally acceptable theory of elections andvoting. Why is there such a lack of progress in the face of such concerted,methodologically sophisticated effort? The greatest shortcoming, webelieve, has been our failure to account for how voters actually go aboutdeciding between candidates. Without an understanding of process, of howand why individuals come to make the choices they do in the voting booth,our understanding of the "meaning" of election outcomes appears, if notvague, then perhaps tautological, long on prediction but short onexplanation.To place this critique in perspective, we turn first to an analyticsummary of the "models" of the individual voter's choice that underlie(whether explicitly or implicitly) the principal varieties of modern votingbehavior studies.PRINCIPALONCEPTIONS F THEDETERMINANTSF VOTING

Virtually all modern political science studies of voting behavior rest onone of the three different underlying conceptions of the determinants ofvoting, often identified as the sociological (Columbia school), social-psychological (Michigan school), and rational choice (Rochester school)approaches.The Sociological ModelAccording to Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944), the principaldeterminants of voting were socioeconomic status, religious affiliation,and

ruralor urban residence. These factorswere assumed to determine politicalattitudes and predispositions (measured by the Index of PoliticalPredispositions, or IPP), which ostensibly lead the voter to his or her

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BLACK-BOXODELSFCANDIDATEVALUATION"natural"party. Also important are voters' primary group identifications(ethnic, racial, family, friends) and ties, which serve to reinforce thedispositions already engendered by the social-historical forces operatingupon the group. Therefore, long-term social and historical forces determinethe political predisposition of the group, while the interpersonal contexttends to reinforce these predispositions. Thus, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, andGaudet (1944, p. 27) proclaimed that "social forces determine politicalpreferences," a clearly socially deterministic view of voting behavior (Keyand Munger, 1956).Where or how these predispositions get activated and then matched toone or another candidate was nowhere explained, despite the authors'stated intention to "study the formation of preferences" and to develop a"theory of political behavior." Their overall conception, given in Figure 1,shows the social determinants (Genesis of Dispositions) shaping (unlabeled)Political Predispositions within the Organism, which is also affected bycampaign Stimuli as filtered through Selective Perception. These severalinputs are somehow integrated into an output, an impulse, that is said toproduce the Response (Vote).The question of particular interest to us here is, how are those inputsintegrated into a candidate choice? Only if we learn the process by whichthe various environmental forces add up to a voting decision can weunderstand how voters are making their choices. As Rossi pointed out(1959), "The underlying model is ... one of the individual making a choiceamong alternatives, his final decision being a resolution of a number of

"SelectivePerception"

"Implementation"

"Genesis f ,/Dispositions" ,/FIG. 1. The Columbiasociologicalmodel of voting choice. Source: Berelson,Bernard,Lazarsfeld,Paul F., and McPhee, WilliamN. (1954).Voting.Chicago:University of Chicago Press, p. 278.

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LODGE,TROH,NDWAHLKE'forces' arising from within himself and from his environment" (p. 26).Although the Columbia authors claimed to be concerned primarily withpredispositions and actions, their analyses are about the relationshipsbetween the social environment (social-historical and interpersonal) andvoting actions, based on untested assumptions about the relationshipbetween the environment and predispositions. They are mainly concernedwith the correlation between preference and vote choice, not themechanisms by which the individual's predispositions are related topreferences.

The Social-Psychological ApproachIn direct contrast to the Columbia studies, the avowed aim of theMichigan school was the explanation of the individual's vote choice. Asstated in The American Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes,1960), "We are concerned with prediction per se only as it serves to test ourunderstanding of the sequence of events leading up to the dependentbehavior" (p. 19). From the beginning, the underlying conception waspsychological, not sociological, the argument being that (1) the correlationsuncovered earlier between economic and social factors and vote would

disappear when proper psychological variables are held constant, and (2)fluctuations in party support could be explained by nonsocial forces arisingfrom the campaign, candidates, and other events.The three principal psychological determinants of the voter's choice inThe American Voter were party identification, issue orientation, andcandidate orientation. The precise conceptualization of the attitudes used toexplain voters' choice varies somewhat in later works, but the followingrepresents the most common conception: Long-term forces (partyidentification and groups politically salient to voter) serve as the anchor,which is adjusted by short-term forces (attitudes toward the candidates,attitudes on issues, and comparative evaluations of the parties' pastperformance on domestic affairs and foreign affairs) that arise from theimmediate campaign environment. This multivariable social-psychologicalconception of vote choice, with its interweaving of sociological andpsychological factors,naturallylends itself to causalpath analysis (cf. Marcusand Converse, 1979).Since publication of The American Voter, the Michigan approach hasinformed more studies of electoral behavior than any other approach.However, despite the connotations of the label "social-psychological," hesestudies tell us little more than did the sociological studies about just howvoters' decisions are made. Despite a strong preference for attitudes asexplanatory variables, the social-psychological modelers are not prone to

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BLACK-BOXODELSF CANDIDATEVALUATIONraise questions about how these variables are determined. Such questions,when raised, are typically answered with anecdotal illustrations of how, say,"salient"and "relevant"factors contribute most to explained variance. Onceagain, the ubiquitous campaign environment serves somehow to activate apredisposition (cf. Key and Munger, 1956).As in the case of the Columbia school's silence on how competingdeterminants are integrated in the voter's decision processes, the Michiganapproach is silent as to how psychological forces are combined into anevaluation of competing candidates. Indeed, Kelley and Mirer (1974)remark in their analysis of the "simple act of voting" that "our ability topredict how voters will vote is far more solidly based that our ability toexplain why," because "secure knowledge about these matters must waitupon a securely established theory of voting," and woefully, "At present,there is no such theory" (p. 572).

Rational-Choice TheoryOne or another variant of the Rochester model is today the ascendantapproach to the study of voting behavior and elections, and is without

question the only approachrooted in an explicit formal theory, or model, ofchoice behavior. As first stated by Anthony Downs (1957), rational choicetheory was known as "expected utility theory." Later writers have modified,if not abandoned, the "interest maximizing"assumption of Downs, so thatthere are now different forms of rational choice theory. But all agree thatwhat distinguishes rational from irrationalchoice behavior is that the votermust (1) formulate a preference, (2) act systematically on the environmentalconstraints that affect the attainment of that preference, (3) act to minimizethe input required to produce the desired output, and (4) revise futureactions in response to failures to satisfy preferences (Bennett and Salisbury,1987).In the interest of simplicity, we illustrate our discussion in terms of thesimpler Downsian version, since the underlying account of process is similaracross models. The basic theory is concerned with the properties andsystematic rules used by voters to generate evaluations of and preferencesamong candidates. For both economic and political (voting) man, themotivatingfactorbehind each choice necessarily is self-interest-maximizingthe net gain from the vote. In the most general terms, the task of therational voter is to solve a set of simple arithmetic problems: Find andcompare the algebraic sums of pluses (benefits, pleasures) and minuses(costs, pains) of voting for each candidate on the ballot. We can outline thetask in the following steps:

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LODGE,TROH,NDWAHLKE1. Calculate the net costs or benefits of a victory by each candidate.2. Rank-orderthe candidates from "most beneficial" to "most costly."3. Cast the ballot for whomever comes out at the top of the ranking.

In actuality the task is considerably more complex than this outlinesuggests because of a crucial rational-choice assumption: Voters' choices forcandidates are based on policy preferences. Candidates are viewed asalternative policy choices open to the voter. This assumption stems not onlyfrom the underlying utilitarianconception of self-interest but also from theconception of a democratic process as one "in which voters choose amongcandidates on the basis of an informed understanding of public issues and ofthe candidate platforms on those issues" (McKelvey and Ordeshook, 1986,p. 909). Nowadays, these computational machinations are frequentlydepicted in spatial models (see Enelow and Hinich, 1985, for a goodaccount) that indicate the voter's preference on each issue, as well as thecandidates'position on the issues, as points on one or more axes (see Figure2).In the simplest possible version, the voter's preference occupies the pointdirectly under the peak of the curve of the voter's utility function, orschedule of preferences, on that issue. The downward slopes from thevoter's ideal point depict the voter's declining preference and utility forpolicies on the issue as they deviate increasingly "left"or "right" rom one'spreferred position. The rational voter will vote for the candidate whoseposition is closest to his or her own in the issue space. While this simpleillustrationmay faithfullyrepresent the logic of spatial modeling, it must beremembered that the voter must deal with not just single issues but withsets of them, and with different assumptions about the candidates' or

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Cu 30 -P. A BX 10 I x I-5 favor * oppose +5VOTERCANDIDATE CANDIDATE

FIG. 2. The theoretical relationship between issue position and candidateevaluation in a spatial model (proximity type). Adapted From: Rabinowitz, George,and Macdonald, Stuart Elaine (1989). A directional theory of voting. AmericanPolitical Science Review 83: 99.

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BLACK-BOXODELSFCANDIDATEVALUATIONparties' stands on them, and must of course combine the multiplecalculations into a single overall evaluation (cf. Enelow and Hinich, 1985).

Making voting decisions rationally (in the technical rational-choice senseof the term)-that is, considering the decision rules as a normative guide tobe followed consciously (and conscientiously) in arriving at votingdecisions-is clearly not a realistic description of how voters either do,could, or might go about choosing the candidate for whom they cast theirballots (Herstein, 1981). Additionally, many scholars, including thosesympathetic to the idea of formally modeling political actions, criticize themost basic assumptions of rational-choicetheory as empirically unjustifiable.Page (1977, pp. 643-649), for example, enumerates some thirteen suchassumptions about the character and shape of voters' political preferencesthat he finds unacceptable on these grounds. Page notes that "there exists afair amount of empirical knowledge about individual political behavior,"andthat "in some cases it stands in rather stark contrast"to such assumptions.Very few laymen and still fewer rational-choicetheorists would begin tosuggest that the kind of computations depicted in the formalmodel should betaken seriously as a practical guide to individual voting choice. Clearly, themodel should be treated as a metaphor, perhaps a useful metaphor, perhapsnot, but certainly as a model that generates predictions without concern forthe actualprocesses that underlie candidate evaluations and choices.MEMORY-BASEDODELSOF CANDIDATEVALUATION

Despite their surfacedifferences, the Columbia, Michigan, and Rochestermodels share a certain basic assumption. Memory-what people canremember about the candidate's partisan affiliation, policy positions,personality traits, etc.-is central to all three contemporary models in thateach treats candidate evaluation as a function of the information retrievedfrom memory (Kelley, 1983). That is, voters must base their evaluation ofthe candidate simply on their recollections about the candidate. In thissense the sociological, social-psychological, and rational-choice models ofcandidate evaluation are memory-based models. Kelley and Mirer (1974)provide the clearest description of such a memory-based model of the"simple act of voting": "The voter canvasses his likes and dislikes of theleading candidates and majorparties involved in an election. Weighing eachlike and dislike equally, he votes for the candidate towardwhom he has thegreatest number of net favorable attitudes" (p. 574).The description assumes that either (1) the information retrieved by therespondents represents a more or less veridical representation of theinformationthey were actually exposed to over the course of the campaign(Kelley, 1983); or (2) what gets retrieved from memory reflects the most

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LODGE,TROH,NDWAHLKErelevant information encountered during the campaign plus information"reasonably" nferred about the candidates on the basis of some stereotypes(e.g., expectations about the candidate'sparty)(cf. Granberg, 1985; Conoverand Feldman, 1986); or (3) both these presuppositions hold true. Thisinformation, whether accurately recollected or selectively filtered andinferred, forms the memory-based data from which the evaluation isostensibly calculated.Similar common-sense assumptions underlie each of the memory-basedapproaches of candidate evaluation. While the Columbia, Michigan, andRochester models differ in what information they suppose the voter hasavailable in memory, each assumes that the voter is able to recollectwhatever facts and campaignevents entered into his or her evaluation of thecandidates. The information could then be construed as the causaldeterminants of the candidate evaluation.

Indeed, a positive relationship between voter memory and candidateevaluation is exactly what the Columbia, Michigan, and Rochester studiesreport: Respondents vote for the candidate who represents their party, orthe candidate garnering the most likes or fewest dislikes (Kelley and Mirer,1974), or the candidate in closest proximityon CPS issue scales (Enelow andHinich, 1985). Predictions of vote choice on the basis of thesememory-based data reach upward of 95%. The concern, however, is thatpeople are either drawing on stereotypes (e.g., of partisan information) tojustify their evaluation, or are rationalizing the evidence said to beinforming their evaluation (Brody and Page, 1972; Kinder, 1978; Granbergand Brent, 1980; Krosnick, 1988).The first class of problems that undermines memory-based models ofevaluation relates to cognitive constraints on the recollection of information.Many psychological studies document the pervasive tendency to distortevents, thereby creating an image of the situation that is neither a veridicalmap of the events nor even a representative sample of the salientinformationto which the voter was exposed. Rather, the voter's recollectioncan best be described as the stereotyping of the event to better fit his or herexpectations (Hamilton, 1981; Nisbett and Ross, 1980; Lodge, McGraw,andStroh, 1989). A second set of problems focuses on evaluative constraints inthe recollection of candidate information: The pros and cons about acandidate often represent the post hoc distortion of the events to fit theevaluation. Various studies have documented this rationalization effect inthe retrieval of information (Johnsonand Judd, 1983; Sebald, 1962).These well-documented biases in recall seriously challenge the implicit,memory-based assumptions of the Columbia, Michigan, and Rochestermodels. The methodological assumption that researchers can rely onrespondents to report more or less accurately the considerations that went

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BLACK-BOXODELSFCANDIDATEVALUATIONinto their candidate evaluation has, indeed, led researchers to inadvertentlystray from the psychological processes that actually undergird candidateevaluations and connect the campaign environment to the voter responses.BLACK-BOX ODELSOF CANDIDATE VALUATION

The assumption that voters' recollections represent the only consider-ations that enter into their candidate evaluations may account for thesurprising failure of the sociological, social-psychological, and rational-choice models of candidate evaluation to provide a detailed account of whatinformation will make its way into the evaluation (see the critique byHerstein, 1981). Contemporary models make robust assumptions about therelationship between voter recollections and candidate evaluations, as wellas about the origin of these recollected considerations (e.g., the campaignenvironment). But these models do not explain how citizens actually goabout recalling remembered information, or choosing what information torecall, or how recalled information gets integrated into a summaryjudgment. From this perspective, the Columbia, Michigan, and Rochestermodels of candidate evaluation and vote choice are black-box (stimulus in,response out) models of choice: campaign events in, recollections andevaluations out. Each of the approaches visualizes the voter as receivinginformationabout candidates, parties, and issues as stimuli from the outsideworld. Then, based on patterns found in the voters' responses (evaluationsand recollections), researchers deduce the presence of predispositions,perceptions, or attitudes said to be in the voter's head.The Columbia, Michigan, and Rochester models are black-box modelsbecause they are silent about the processes that drive their explanations.They posit a direct relationship between the stimuli impinging on thevoter's mind, and the voter's reconstruction of his or her candidateevaluation. The political science models do, however, differ from thebehavioristic models so characteristic of the psychology of the 1950s.Skinnerianism is opposed in principle to mentalism, arguing that becausesuch "mind stuff' as attitudes, predispositions, and the like are affected bythe very same environmental conditions that affect the behavioral response,such mentalist constructs are not explanatory variables. In contrast, theblack-box models of political science are in principle committed topsychological constructs-attitudes, political interest, sense of citizen duty,and the like-but simply fail to delve into the mental processes said to affectchoice. Like the behaviorist, the sociological, social-psychological, andrational-choice analysts are more concerned with the mathematicaldescription of relationships between the objective stimulus informationandthe vote than with how, when, and why preferences are formed. Thus, the

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LODGE,TROH,NDWAHLKEtheories of voting that presume the workingof voters' mental process do notoffer a conceptualization or give a clue as to the probable character of thetheories or a hint as to how they might be examined.AN IMPRESSION-DRIVENODELOF CANDIDATEVALUATION

The failure to find unambiguous empirical support for memory-causes-judgment assumptions, coupled with the limitations of the black-boxmodels, has spurred interest in what we call the "impression-drivenmodelof evaluation" (Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh, 1989; McGraw, Lodge, andStroh, this issue; Hastie and Park, 1986; Wyer and Srull, 1986). This modelabandons memory-based assumptions and focuses instead on the on-lineformation of an evaluation counter (what Hastie and Park, 1986, call a"judgment operator, and Wyer and Srull, 1986, term an "informationintegrator").This judgment tally integrates the affective value of candidateinformation as it is encountered (Anderson, 1988). That is, people simplycull the affect from stimuli upon exposure and immediately integrate it intoan evaluation, without having to remember the specific evidence thatoriginally led to their evaluation. Once the evaluation is formed, citizens,being "cognitive misers," discard the considerations that go into their tallyand simply store the summary evaluation in memory. This model impliesthat if later asked for their candidate evaluation, people retrieve theirsummary tally; and if asked for their likes and dislikes, they will reportstereotypes and rationalizations.The impression-driven process model, of course, assumes very littleabout the ability of voters to reconstruct their candidate evaluations. Insteadit requires of citizens only that they retrieve the evaluation counter to guidetheir voting behavior. This model serves, perhaps, as an explanation for thefact that people can often report how much they like or dislike a book,movie, candidate, or policy, but cannot recount the reasons for theirreaction (cf. Gant and Davis, 1984). People will only dredge up (i.e., justify,stereotype, and rationalize) specific reasons for their candidate evaluationwhen pressed by someone to give reasons.From this perspective, impression-driven processing would appear likelyto produce a stronger correlation between (1) what campaign informationcitizens are actually exposed to and infer, and (2) the direction and strengthof their evaluation (inasmuch as that evaluation is made as the evidence isencountered). Additionally, the impression-driven model also seems moreefficacious than any memory-based model, since the citizen need onlyretrieve the summary tally from memory, not the bits and pieces ofinformation that originally contributed to the evaluation. All theseconsiderations point to the same conclusion: The study of candidate

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BLACK-BOXODELS FCANDIDATEVALUATIONevaluation should become more concerned with the actual, real-timeprocesses that transformcampaign stimuli into the political response.CONCLUSIONS

Given the goal of understanding voting decisions-that is, how votersdecide which candidate they prefer-we need to start from an empiricallyfaithful description of the character and sequence (or simultaneity) of whatgoes on during the individual's evaluation process. The test of the modelwill be its ability to account for the individual voter's choices (not just theaggregate of all voters' choices) from our understanding of the steps in his orher mental processes. Such a model is necessary if we are to compare votingchoices of different voters, in different kinds of situations, and understandthe dynamics of voter response to political campaigns and other stimuli.Today, the cognitive approach represents the major alternative tomicroeconomic theories of political behavior. Rational-choice theories,despite being psychologically barren, represent the only true theory ofelectoral behavior we have, and even a bad theory is better than no theoryat all. Another favorable feature of microeconomic models is that they lendthemselves to the formal, mathematical expression of input-outputrelationships. But the cognitive, information-processing approach, infocusing on the process of choice-making, offers the promise ofpsychological realism (Simon, 1985) along with computational formality (cf.Hastie, 1988; Ostrom, 1988; Shaffer, 1974).Although the existing voting-behavior literature offers no such model ofprocess, it does offer some strong hints about its probable character andsubstance. To begin, it must be a genuinely behavioral model, which in thisinstance means it must (1) be a model of the process of decision-making bythe individual voter, and (2) be empirically specified-that is, defined interms of measurable events in that process. In the second place, it mustaccommodate those well-documented findings reported in the voting-behavior literature referred to by such words as predispositions, attitudes,orientations, identifications, preferences, opinions, and decision (all ofwhich are central concepts in one or another of the various approaches wehave examined). As political scientists we hope that impression-drivenprocess models can account for what we see as the most robust findings ofprior research in voting behavior: (1) the persistence of long-term, priorevaluations on the interpretation of new information, what are called"anchoringeffects"; and (2) insufficient "adjustment effects," the relativelyweak effects of short-term factors on evaluation. All such terms refer, ofcourse to constructs and processes that reside in and take place in the mind.From our perspective, a psychologically informed model of candidate

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LODGE,TROH,NDWAHLKEevaluation must also satisfy the constraints of bounded rationality (Simon,1985), the most important being that (1) the interpretation of campaignstimuli is dependent on the citizen's prior knowledge and expectations-what cognitive and affective information about the candidates is"represented"in memory; that (2) the amount of information the citizen canintegrate into a candidate evaluation is limited by the active cognitivecapacity of the human mind; and that (3) the information retrieved frommemory rarely represents the campaign environment and events accu-rately, but rather constitutes an array of cognitively and evaluativelyconstrained (i.e., stereotyped and rationalized)recollections.It is incumbent upon researchers to construct models of candidateevaluation that do not require more capacity and processing skills thanhuman beings are known to possess. The discipline's reliance onrespondents' ability to recollect their likes and dislikes of candidates (aswellas their recollection of the candidates' position on the issue scales used todevelop proximity scores) may well be misdirected. The consequence is thatpolitical science models of candidate evaluation should back away frommemory-based conceptions of candidate evaluation and start investigating(as a matter of necessity) the ongoing processes inside the black box of thevoter's mind.

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BLACK-BOXODELSF CANDIDATEVALUATIONDowns, Anthony (1957). An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York:Harper &Co.Eldersveld, Samuel J. (1951). Theory and method in voting behavior research.Journal of Politics 13(1): 70-87. Reprinted in Eulau, Heinz, et al., eds. (1956).Political Behavior. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, pp. 267-274.Enelow, James M., and Hinich, Melvin J. (1985). The Spatial Theory of Voting:AnIntroduction. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Cant, Michael, and Davis Dwight (1984). Mental economy and voter rationality:Theinformed citizen problem in voting research. Journal of Politics 46: 132-153.Gosnell, Harold F. (1930). Why Europe Votes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Gosnell, Harold F. (1942). Grass Roots Politics. Washington, DC: American Councilon Public Affairs.Granberg, Donald (1985). An anomaly in political perception. Public OpinionQuarterly 99: 504-516.Granberg, Donald, and Brent, E. (1980). Perceptions of political candidates. Amer-ican Scientists 68: 617-625.Hamilton, D. L. (1981). Cognitive Processes in Stereotyping and Intergroup Behav-ior. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Hastie, Reid (1988). A computer simulation model of person memory. Journal ofExperimental Social Psychology 24(5): 423-447.Hastie, Reid, and Park, Bernadette (1986). The relationship between memory and

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Black-Box Models of Candidate Evaluation