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Political Candidates (political + candidate)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Motivations, Goals, Information Search, and Memory about Political Candidates

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2001
Li-Ning Huang
This study investigated the ways in which motivations and goals affect patterns of political information-seeking and the consequent structure of memory about candidates. Undergraduate participants used a computerized system that displayed different layers of information about fictional political candidates; the system recorded the strategies they used to search through this information. Results showed that motivations to engage in effortful processing produced tendencies to engage in within-candidate searches, better recall, and memory structures clustered by candidate. The goal of forming impressions of the candidates, which was expected to lead to within-candidate searching, was in fact modestly associated with weaker tendencies to do so, once effort was taken into account. Impression-formation goals, however, were associated with less attribute-based memory structures. The findings confirm that the manner in which people acquire candidate information has important consequences for the way they store that information in memory, and that these processes vary according to individual motivations and goals. [source]

Using Affective Attitudes to Identify Christian Fundamentalism: The Ten Commandments Judge and Alabama Politics

POLITICS & POLICY, Issue 5 2010
THOMAS SHAW
This article develops a new and useful indicator to aid in identifying Christian fundamentalism. "Affect" measures individuals' affective attitudes toward the role of Christian fundamentalists in Alabama politics. We demonstrate the analytic utility of this indicator by quantitatively comparing it to other more traditional and direct measures of fundamentalism, such as belief in the Bible as the literal word of God, self-identification as a fundamentalist, and whether one considers oneself to be "born again." We then compare the utility of these different measures of Christian fundamentalism in explaining electoral support for the archetype Christian fundamentalist political candidate, the "Ten Commandments Judge" Roy Moore, former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. We find that our affect indicator compares well to other measures of fundamentalism and actually outperforms all of the more traditional measures in explaining support for Moore. Data used in the analysis come from a public opinion poll conducted by the USA Polling Group in April 2006. Este artículo desarrolla un nuevo y útil indicador para ayudar a identificar el fundamentalismo cristiano. "Afecto" mide las actitudes afectivas de los individuos hacia el rol de los cristianos fundamentalistas en la política de Alabama. Demostramos la utilidad analítica de este indicador al compararlo cuantitativamente con otras medidas más tradicionales y directas del fundamentalismo, tales como la creencia de la Biblia como la palabra literal de Dios, auto-identificación como fundamentalista, y si uno se considera a uno mismo "nacido de nuevo." Después comparamos la utilidad de estas diferentes medidas del fundamentalismo cristiano para explicar el apoyo electoral al candidato político cristiano fundamentalista arquetípico: Roy Moore, "Juez de los Diez Mandamientos," ex-presidente del tribunal de la Corte Suprema de Alabama. Encontramos que nuestro indicador Afecto se equipara con otras medidas del fundamentalismo y en realidad supera a todas las más tradicionales mediciones que explican el apoyo a Moore. La información utilizada en el análisis proviene de una encuesta de opinión pública realizada por el USA Polling Group en Abril del 2006. [source]

Motivations, Goals, Information Search, and Memory about Political Candidates

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2001
Li-Ning Huang
This study investigated the ways in which motivations and goals affect patterns of political information-seeking and the consequent structure of memory about candidates. Undergraduate participants used a computerized system that displayed different layers of information about fictional political candidates; the system recorded the strategies they used to search through this information. Results showed that motivations to engage in effortful processing produced tendencies to engage in within-candidate searches, better recall, and memory structures clustered by candidate. The goal of forming impressions of the candidates, which was expected to lead to within-candidate searching, was in fact modestly associated with weaker tendencies to do so, once effort was taken into account. Impression-formation goals, however, were associated with less attribute-based memory structures. The findings confirm that the manner in which people acquire candidate information has important consequences for the way they store that information in memory, and that these processes vary according to individual motivations and goals. [source]

Linguistic Markers of Psychological State through Media Interviews: John Kerry and John Edwards in 2004, Al Gore in 2000

ANALYSES OF SOCIAL ISSUES & PUBLIC POLICY, Issue 1 2005
James W. Pennebaker
What can we learn about presidential candidates by examining their speech in natural conversation? In the present study, the television interviews from the 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign of John Kerry (N= 29) and John Edwards (N= 34) were examined using linguistic analyses. Results indicate that Kerry and Edwards were similar in their use of positive emotion words, but that Kerry used significantly higher rates of negative emotion words than did Edwards. Comparisons with televised interviews of Al Gore from the 2000 presidential campaign (N= 17) revealed striking similarities in the linguistic styles of Gore and Kerry. Gore's linguistic style overlapped considerably with that of Kerry on pronoun usage and many cognitive domains. This study points to how linguistic analyses can give us a clearer picture of how political candidates think, act, and feel. [source]