In the Eye of the Beholder: Leader Images in Canada

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Abstract
The “leader factor” in Canadian voting has received surprisingly little research attention. In this article, the authors employ data from the 1974, 1979, 1980 and 1984 Canadian National Election Studies to examine the organization of respondents' images of the major political party leaders. The central thesis developed here is that respondents' images of the leaders are not typically idiosyncratic to the leader or to the election in question. The images are shaped by a prototypical leader schema that affects the information about leaders that is processed and recalled. The authors test several implications of this thesis. They demonstrate that there is considerable commonality in the content of a citizen's images of leaders in any one election, and that there is evidence of both aggregate and individual-level stability in the structure of images across elections. The authors test an additional hypothesis from schema theory concerning individual differences in image content. In this regard, they demonstrate, contrary to some of the literature, that better-educated respondents are more likely than less-educated respondents to cite task-relevant dispositional attributes of the leaders.

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