Responsiveness is the hallmark of democracy. The policy government enacts should reflect
the wishes of the electorate. If it does not representation and our system of government is broken.
Elections play a key role. They are the only formal link between the will of the people and
government’s policies and are the heart of representation. The effectiveness of campaigns, then,
is central to the workings of elections and the health of our democracy. If campaigns enable
representation by encouraging voters to connect issues and their vote, then democracy may work.
If they hinder representation by moving voters away from using issues when voting then
democracy is in trouble. We do not know which is the case. We do know that campaigns matter
—the campaign alters the decisions voters make (Campbell 2000; Hillygus and Jackman 2003;
Holbrook 1994; 1995; Shaw 1999; Wlezien and Erikson 2001; 2002). We do not, however,
know how campaigns matter; the mechanism that individuals are influenced by is unknown.
Campaign effects stem from both persuasion and heresthetic change or priming
(changing the weights applied to or salience of specific determinants of vote choice, see Bartels
2006; Riker 1990). The literature contains a slew of theoretic conjectures about how these
changes occur, but there have been no attempts to undercover the underlying psychological
mechanisms behind this priming in campaigns. The growing understanding about the different
forms of attitude strength (Miller and Peterson 2004), provides a framework for testing what is
the psychological mechanism behind this priming. Because these different types of attitude
strength have different antecedents, how they respond to campaign information and how they, in
turn, mediate the effect of the campaign can provide an answer to how campaigns matter and
why.
The initial hypothesis tested here is that campaigns work by altering the strength of citizens’
attitudes. But it is not enough to suggest that attitude strength matters—this would provide little
improvement over the current understanding of campaigns. My aim in this paper is to
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Convention