don’t become more liberal, but use their attitudes on issues more when voting. This idea of
priming is similar to Riker’s (1990) concept of heresthetic change—where the content of choices
does not change, but the criteria used (e.g. the weight applied to different dimensions of
comparison between the candidates) does change. In fact, Bartels’ discussion of priming
removes a central psychological concern from the understanding of priming—that it works by
altering the accessibility of the attitudes being used (Iyengar and Kinder 1987). His focus is
purely on the change in the size of the link between an attitude and vote choice without concern
for why or how this change occurred.
There is ample work on campaigns documenting this heresthetic change in campaigns
(Bartels 2006; Carsey 2000; Gelman and King 1993; Johnston Blais, Brady, and Crete 1992;
Johnston, Hagen, and Jamieson 2004). There are also a number of different theoretical
justifications for these changes: enlightenment (Gelman and King 1993), priming (Bartels 2006;
Johnston et al 1992; Johnston, Hagen and Jamieson 2004), changes in salience (Carsey 2000).
But all of these works share a common measure for this heresthetic change. They all rely on
time as the central measure of the campaign. This blunt measurement of campaigns makes it
impossible to compare the support for the rival explanations of campaign effects or to gain any
leverage over why campaigns work.
In contrast to the scant evidence of the source of the temporal heterogeneity in voter
decision making in the campaign effects literature, there is a sizable body of work explaining
cross sectional heterogeneity. This may be of use in explaining why campaigns work as they do.
Some of this work cannot be tied to explaining the priming effects from campaigns. If the source
of the heterogeneity is something that does not respond to the campaign (education or political
sophistication) then it cannot account for the campaign effects. The growing literature on the
role of attitude strength in voting provides a starting point for theorizing about the nature of these
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Convention