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The Predictive Benefits of Importance: Do Issue Importance Ratings Improve the Prediction of Political Attitudes?
Author(s) -
Kenski Kate,
Fishbein Martin
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2005.tb02132.x
Subject(s) - voting , psychology , social psychology , expectancy theory , presidential election , value (mathematics) , politics , predictive value , presidential system , voting behavior , political science , computer science , medicine , law , machine learning
Using data collected in Arizona during the 2000 Presidential election, this study explores whether expectancy value (EV) models predicting attitudes toward candidates and toward voting for candidates can be improved by incorporating measures of issue importance. More specifically, attitudes toward candidates were predicted from beliefs about the candidates’ stands on 8 issues, and attitudes toward voting for the candidates were predicted from beliefs that voting for a candidate would lead to the implementation of the 8 issue positions. Ratings of the importance of the 8 issues were used to develop several different EV models. The results of our study indicate that importance ratings do not add much to the EV model's prediction of attitudes.