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AbstractAttitude importance is a key variable in most models seeking to explain evaluations of political parties and leaders. Unlike attitudes on less central issues, attitudes about aspects of politics which citizens deem personally important are expected to influence their political judgments. In this article, we propose to conceptualize the importance of attitudes as their accessibility in memory and measure it by the time survey respondents take to answer an attitude question. We apply this framework to the way in which issue attitudes (opinions on Europe, immigration, etc.) influence party evaluations in the context of the 2011 Swiss parliamentary elections. As expected, quicker responses tend to be associated with stronger relationships between issue opinions and party evaluations. Promises and limits of this approach to conceptualizing attitude importance are discussed.

In this article we propose a model to explain how voters' perceptions of their ideological proximity to a party affect their propensity to vote for that party. We argue that political knowledge plays a crucial moderating role in the relationship between party proximity and voting propensity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between institutional knowledge (information about the political system) and party knowledge (information about the parties' left–right positions). An analysis of survey data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections supports our main hypothesis that party knowledge enhances the link between party proximity and voting propensity. Institutional knowledge may have additional influence, but clear evidence for this effect was obtained only for propensities to vote for the Swiss People's Party (SVP). Overall, the impact of political knowledge was found to be substantial, even after controlling for the outstanding influence of party identification and other predictors of voting propensities.

In this article we propose a model to explain how voters' perceptions of their ideological proximity to a party affect their propensity to vote for that party. We argue that political knowledge plays a crucial moderating role in the relationship between party proximity and voting propensity. It is necessary, however, to distinguish between institutional knowledge (information about the political system) and party knowledge (information about the parties' left-right positions). An analysis of survey data from the 2007 Swiss federal elections supports our main hypothesis that party knowledge enhances the link between party proximity and voting propensity. Institutional knowledge may have additional influence, but clear evidence for this effect was obtained only for propensities to vote for the Swiss People's Party (SVP). Overall, the impact of political knowledge was found to be substantial, even after controlling for the outstanding influence of party identification and other predictors of voting propensities. Adapted from the source document.

This article proposes an extended model of how "media priming effects" come about, distinguishing between several mediators and moderators of priming. The model is tested using data from an experiment on Swiss foreign policy in which undergraduate students were provided with different types of biased information about the relationships between Switzerland and the European Union. The empirical analysis suggests that cross-sectional and cross-temporal effects are facilitated by quite different moderators, and that very few variables moderate priming according to both perspectives. In that respect, political knowledge, the level of recall of the experimental message, and awareness of the persuasive intent of the message appear central to the priming mechanism.

AbstractAccording to the issue ownership theory of voting, voters cast their ballot for the party that they consider to be most competent and most committed to handle an issue of importance to them. This article offers a theoretical expansion of this model, arguing that the effect of issue ownership on vote choice is conditioned by the accessibility of voters' ownership perceptions, as measured by response latencies. Through individual‐level analyses of voting in the 2019 Swiss federal election, we demonstrate that the effect of voters' issue ownership perceptions on their voting decisions is strongest when their ownership attributions are highly accessible and when the issue at stake is considered important. Our results also reveal that the effects of accessibility are largely driven by voting decisions for parties that own the issue in the eyes of a large part of the electorate, such as the Greens in the case of the environment.