Candidates, Issues and Voters: The Role of Inference in Political Perception

The study of political perception has been dominated by research on the perception of candidates' issue positions, focusing on the processes of projection and persuasion. This research has limited our understanding of political perception by interpreting projection and persuasion narrowly in terms of cognitive balance theory. Only recently has the possible impact of candidate ambiguity on voters' perception come to be appreciated. In this paper, we use a more comprehensive theory of perception to specify a series of lagged recursive equations and estimate the parameters using the CPS 1974-76 panel data. Our results provide no support for the persuasion hypothesis, and only limited evidence of projection. Rather, the inference of candidates' issue positions from party positions and the candidates' ideological stances are much more important factors in candidate perception.