Determinants of Political Judgments: The Joint Influence of Normative and Heuristic Rules of Inference

Prior research on political judgment has been polarized, with one group emphasizing normative models of political inference and the other emphasizing heuristic models of political inference. In accordance with recent findings in psychology, this article is rooted in the assumption that both normative and heuristic criteria simultaneously influence political judgments. Furthermore, differences in the relative extent to which these two processes serve to determine political judgments are hypothesized to depend on the nature of the judgment task. Two kinds of political judgments are considered: judgments reflecting beliefs about the candidates' stands on the issues and judgments reflecting global evaluations of the candidates. The reported results confirm that (1) voters rely on both normative- and heuristic-based considerations when forming these judgments, and (2) the relative extent to which these criteria influence these judgments depends on the complexity of the judgment task.