The Electoral Consequences of Ambivalence toward Presidential Candidates

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that political opinions are not simply positive or negative, but are often simultaneously positive and negative, or ambivalent. Although there is evidence that ambivalence influences the dynamics of public opinion on policy issues, little is known about its role in contributing to electoral decision making. Using National Election Studies data from 1980 to1996, I examine the consequences of ambivalence toward presidential candidates for electoral judgment and choice. Results revealed that ambivalence created instability in candidate evaluations, substantially delayed the formation of citizens' voting intentions, conditioned the influence of both personality assessments and issue proximity on summary candidate evaluation, and ultimately weakened the prediction of vote choice. Throughout the analyses, the effects of ambivalence were independent of and typically larger than those of partisanship strength, information, education, and attitude strength, and could not be meaningfully accounted for by any of these factors. In broad terms, ambivalence would appear to capture a unique and fundamentalalthough to date largely ignoredaspect of mass belief systems and electoral choice. '14 i early all contemporary public opinion research rests on the assumption that political attitudes are unidimensional and biJL < spolar-i.e., negative, or neutral evaluative responses (e.g., Green and Citrin 1994; Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh 1989). In studies of mass belief systems and electoral behavior, for example, attitudes toward policies, candidates, and groups are typically operationalized as summary statements that range from unfavorable oppose, cold, or at one end of the continuum to favorable' support, warm, or positive, at the other. This view implies that positive attitudes are the diametric opposite of negative attitudes, such that the more one likes a political object the less one dislikes it. Unfortunately, this structural assumption masks a fundamental and readily acknowledged aspect of belief systems, namely, that individual opinions are not simply positive or negative evaluative tendencies, but instead are often simultaneously positive and negative (Alvarez and Brehm 1995; Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson 1997; Feldman and Zaller 1992; Hochschild 1981; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1998; Lavine et al. 1998; Nelson 1999; Zaller and Feldman 1992). That is, rather than endorsing one side of a political debate and refuting the other, individuals often embrace central elements of both sides. Citizens who internalize elements of both sides of a political conflict are not necessarily revealing doorstep opinions (i.e., nonattitudes, Converse 1964); nor do their opinions reflect deficiencies in survey measurement (Achen 1975). Rather, such complex attitudes often represent the problem of reconciling strongly held but conflicting principles and considerations simultaneously present in the political culture in order to make difficult political choices (Alvarez and Brehm 1995; Feldman and Zaller 1992; Huckfeldt and Sprague 1998). Recent work in particular suggests that ambivalence-an individual's endorsement of competing considerations relevant to evaluating an attitude object-is a prevalent characteristic of the public's political opinions, and that ambivalence has nontrivial implications for political judgment and choice. For example, policy attitudes marked by evaluative