How Voters Decide

Richard Lau is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Study of Democracy in the Political Science Department at Rutgers University. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. He has published in all of the major journals in political science and social psychology, and recently wrote (with Gerald Pomper) Negative Campaigning: An Analysis of U.S. Senate Elections (2004). David P. Redlawsk is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. Prior to completing his Ph.D. and arriving at the University of Iowa in 1999, Redlawsk spent nearly ten years in the technology industry, managing information systems for colleges, and working as a management consultant. As a political scientist, he has published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics and Political Psychology, among others. He twice received the Roberta Sigel Best Paper Award from the International Society of Political Psychology. He co-edited Hate Speech on Campus: Cases, Commentary, and Case Studies (1997) with Milton Heumann and Thomas Church, and is currently completing an edited volume on emotion in politics to be published in 2006. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation.

"How Voters Decide: Information Processing during Election Campaigns is a major contribution to our understanding of voting behavior, decision making, and political psychology. Richard Lau and David Redlawsk have employed an innovative methodology to investigate the processes by which voters make sense of the enormous flow of information in a election campaign. The research is carefully designed and analyzed and the results yield insights into mechanisms of political information processing that are normally hidden from view by the standard research methods used in political science. This research shows how the strategies that people use to process information affect the electoral decisions they make and, ultimately, the extent to which elections truly represent the interests of voters." Stanley Feldman, Stony Brook University

• Part I. Theory and Methods: 1. Introduction; 2. A new theory of voter decision making; 3. Studying voting as a process; 4. What is correct voting?; Part II. Information Processing: 5. What voters do - a first cut; 6. Individual differences in information processing; 7. Campaign effects on information processing; Part III. Politics: 8. Evaluating candidates; 9. Voting; 10. Voting correctly; 11. Political heuristics; Part IV. Conclusion: 12. A look back, and a look forward; Part V. Appendices and References.