Different paths to the same result: Rational choice, political psychology and impression formation in campaigns

This paper analyzes impression formation in political campaigns-how citizens assess a candidate's unobserved characteristics as a prelude to their vote decisions. This behavior is modeled using two approaches, one a psychology-based model in which voters behave as motivated tacticians, the other a game-theoretic version where voters are sequentially rational. The aim of the analysis is two-fold: to deepen our understanding of how voters reconcile alternate sources of candidate information and to compare predictions derived from ostensibly incompatible theories of human behavior. The analysis shows, surprisingly, that the models yield the same predictions about impression formation. The analysis also characterizes the impact of strategic behavior on impression formation and pre diets conditions where voters are primed to move beyond initial impressions, identifying an asymmetry in how voters respond to new information depending on the content of their initial impressions and whether the information is confirmatory or contradictory.