Michael F. Meffert

Sequential Information Integration and Belief Trajectories: An Experimental Study Using Candidate Evaluations

Using an extended model of information integration theory, the sequential information integration model (SIIM), the effects of initially presented information on belief trajectories were investigated. SIIM predicts (a) damped oscillatory trajectories when congruent information and incongruent information are presented alternately; and (b) smaller amplitudes of trajectories when initial beliefs have greater weight. An experiment was conducted that utilized a hypothetical election (N=201). Participants initially received specific (vs. no) information about candidates’ positions on issues and then indicated their evaluation of the candidates 11 times in response to additional pieces of information that were provided over time. As predicted, belief trajectories were found to have damped oscillatory patterns. The amplitude of the trajectories was smaller for participants with strong party identification than for those with weak party identification. Implications of these findings for theories of persuasion and political decision-making are discussed.

Experimental triangulation of coalition signals : varying designs, converging results

It is probably fair to say that political science has not been a welcoming discipline for experimental research (McDermott, 2002). Our discipline has always expressed skepticism about the usefulness and the prospects of experimental designs to address the key research questions we care about. But the more political scientists have started to think carefully about causal relationships and what is required to test them, the more they came (or should come) to realize that our traditional methodologies and research designs are also not sufficient. The latter have serious limitations as well, and some of these limitations can be addressed by experimental methods. Because experimental designs have unique strengths compared to other research designs, it is not surprising that the use of experiments has evolved and increased over time (Morton and Williams, 2010). Put simply, experiments are flexible tools for theory testing that allow us to establish causality by clearly separating causes and effects.

Weighting parties and coalitions : how coalition signals influence voting behavior

Democratic accountability is characterized as weak in parliamentary systems where voters cannot choose their government directly. We argue that coalition signals about desirable and undesirable coalitions that might be formed after the election help to provide this essential aspect of democratic government. We propose a simple model that identifies the effect of coalition signals on individual vote decisions. Based on survey experiments in two different countries we show how coalition signals change the relative weight of voters’ party and coalition considerations. Coalition signals increase the importance of coalition considerations and, at the same time, decrease the importance of party considerations in voters’ decision calculus, leading some voters to change their vote intention.

The block-weighted cleavage salience index

In their seminal book, Bartolini and Mair (1990: 44–5) proposed the cleavage salience index (CS) to capture ‘the salience of the cleavage, that is, its importance and weight within the general context of the electoral behaviour of a given country and/or period’. In this article, we demonstrate theoretically and empirically that the CS index cannot be used to measure and compare the strength of cleavages over time and for different cleavages. The reason is fairly straightforward; the index does not take into account the actual, absolute level of electoral support for the cleavage block parties, which influences the potential range of the index values. As a better alternative to the original CS index, we propose the block-weighted cleavage salience index (WCS) and provide empirical data about class and religious cleavages in 11 European multiparty systems from 1950 to 2010.