James W. Prothro

Public Opinion and the Movement of Chilean Government to the Left, 1952–72

* This article was made possible by a Collaborative Research Training Project in Chile supported by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program (FAFP) in the summer of 1972. As graduate students participating in the project, Richard Moore of the University of Texas and Brian Smith of Yale University did much of the work in data gathering, coding, and tabulation; Jose Luis Rodriguez of Yale joined them in criticizing and shaping our ideas. We are also indebted to Luis Quiros of the Centro Latinoamericano de Demograflia, Jorge Tapia of the Universidad Catolica, Chile, and Federico Gil and David Kovenock of the University of North Carolina. All these individuals share with the FAFP any credit but no blame for what follows.

Political evocation and styles of candidate evaluation

Recent work in cognitive processing and individual decision making has emphasized that individuals vary in the criteria they bring to bear to evaluate political objects. In this paper we argue that individual differences are but one piece of the decision-making puzzle, and that environmental factors are also important. Of particular interest to us is the idea that different candidates evoke different evaluative criteria. Using data from a 1984 sample of undergraduates and the 1980 National Election Study, we find evidence that political evocation effects do exist. This result has implications for understanding both the decision calculus of individuals and the collective rationality of the electorate.