Suchergebnisse

This article advances a bounded rationality approach to account for a fundamental challenge in the study of voting behavior; finding a model that allows voters to be driven by both affective partisan attachments and rational issue considerations. Voters choose candidates they feel will perform best on the issues, but on the issues about which they care most, and on the issues as they see them. Party identification acts as the crucial bound on individual rationality, canalizing attention to issues either owned by or successfully leased by their own party and biasing expectations of issue handling. My empirical analysis of the 2008 presidential election shows the recession was a powerful predictor of defection, but rather than valence—was the economy better or worse—what mattered was the level of importance an individual placed on the economy.