Political Expertise and Issue Voting in Presidential Elections

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Abstract
Recent research on political expertise indicates that what citizens know and how much they think about politics affect the political choices they make. So it would seem for issue voting in presidential elections. Unfor tunately, prior work has yielded such conflicting results that we lack a clear understanding of how expertise affects the vote. Drawing on re search from social and political psychology, I argue that the accessibility of policy attitudes from memory depends on political expertise. Given greater accessibility of policy attitudes, issue voting should be more pro nounced at higher levels of expertise. In contrast to most previous work, this research measures expertise with interval-level knowledge scales and employs formal interaction tests. Data from the 1984 and 1988 National Election Study surveys are used to test my hypotheses. Results show that increasing expertise results in higher levels of sociotropic, ideological, and policy voting.

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