A Computatiional Model of Voter-The Dynamics of Political Candidate Evaluation

John Q. Public, a computational model of political cognition which incorporates both cognitive and affective mechanisms, is employed as a voter facing political campaign information. A series of hypothetical, computational experiments show that the model successfully reproduces a set of well-known empirical phenomena found in electoral research and research on political cognition. Specifically, in response to issue and candidate information, the model reproduces 1) practice, recency, and spreading activation effects on recall, 2) cognitive and attitude priming effects, 3) question order and wording effects in survey research, and 4) both on-line and memory-based processing. Given the space limit, only some of axiomatic characterizations of the model and some of the simulation results were presented here. (For formal presentation and full discussion of the model and simulation results, see Kim, Lodge, & Taber, MPSA 2004 Conference Proceeding.)