A Matter of Distinction

Abstract

Because Republican and Democratic elites have polarized in recent decades, American voters increasingly face choices between candidates who hold divergent policy positions. Such a development has potential implications for the way voters process information during campaigns and choose between candidates on election day. Drawing on research in political psychology and using a nationally representative survey-experiment, we argue and find that levels of candidate polarization—the convergence or divergence of candidates’ issue positions—affect voter information consumption, recall of campaign information, and the balance of on-line and memory-based processing employed in the vote decision. In showing that voters faced with more similar candidates rely more heavily on memory-based processing, we provide further support for hybrid models of political information processing and suggest that candidate polarization has consequences for voter attitude strength and resistance to persuasion.