Political sophistication and issue voting: an intra-individual level analysis

Much attention in political science has been devoted to an explication of how voters make use of issues to guide political preferences. The extant literature suggests that, while sophisticated voters make greater use of issue proximity in their electoral calculus, issues remain important to even the least politically knowledgeable of citizens. The empirical investigations on which this conclusion is based have relied on analysis of cross-sectional data. In this paper we use repeated measures data to investigate how intraindividual change in measures of issue proximity is related to intraindividual change in party evaluations. Individual change in the distance respondents place themselves from a party is shown to be strongly associated with change in evaluations of the party over the same time period but this relationship is moderated by existing levels of political awareness. For less sophisticated voters, neither a directional nor a spatial model of issue proximity appears to apply.