Campaigns, Issue Importance, and Vote Choice.

Analyses of issue voting have largely ignored heterogeneity among voters in their perceptions of the importance of various issues. Even those scholars who have taken issue importance more seriously have largely neglected the relationship between these perceptions and campaign dynamics. Do relationships between issue attitudes and vote choice change as perceptions of issue importance change over the course of a campaign? More specifically, do those who come to perceive an issue as more important by the end of campaign behave similarly to those who consistently regard the issue as important? Prior work on issue importance suggests that salience of issue attachments should fluctuate during a campaign, but this thesis has gone untested due to lack of sufficient data for exploring individual-level dynamics over time. This paper uses a unique ten-wave panel survey to conduct two analyses. The first models individual-level change in perceptions of issue importance, giving some sense of both the times during an election year when these perceptions are susceptible to change and the people whose perceptions are more likely to change. The second examines differences in the extent of issue voting among those with different perceptions of importance and different times. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]