Cancellation and Focus Model of Choice and Preferences for Political Candidates

Political voter choices, although obviously much studied, have seen relatively little application in formal models of decision making. This study examines the political domain from the perspective of one such model: cancellation and focus. The cancellation and focus model describes a feature-matching comparison process for preference choices in which features shared by the choice alternatives are cancelled, and greater weight is placed on the unique features of the alternative that is the subject, or starting point, of the comparison. This model proposes that the result of a comparison between two objects will depend not only on the features or aspects of those objects, but also on how these features or aspects are recruited and weighted for use in the comparison. As predicted by the model, for candidate pairs with unique good features, the candidate providing the subject of the comparison was preferred, while for candidate pairs with unique bad features, the candidate acting as the target of the comparison was preferred. Further, when candidate descriptions were encountered as a part of unique-good pairs they received higher postchoice evaluations than when those identical candidate descriptions were encountered as part of unique-bad pairs. Implications of the cancellation and focus model of choice for negative political campaigning are discussed.