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In the Eye of the Beholder: Leader Images in Canada*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Steven D. Brown ,
Ronald D. Lambert ,
Barry J. Kay  and
James E. Curtis
Steven D. Brown
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
Ronald D. Lambert
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
Barry J. Kay
Affiliation:
Wilfrid Laurier University
James E. Curtis
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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Abstract

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The “leader factor” in Canadian voting has received surprisingly little research attention. In this article, the authors employ data from the 1974, 1979, 1980 and 1984 Canadian National Election Studies to examine the organization of respondents' images of the major political party leaders. The central thesis developed here is that respondents' images of the leaders are not typically idiosyncratic to the leader or to the election in question. The images are shaped by a prototypical leader schema that affects the information about leaders that is processed and recalled. The authors test several implications of this thesis. They demonstrate that there is considerable commonality in the content of a citizen's images of leaders in any one election, and that there is evidence of both aggregate and individual-level stability in the structure of images across elections. The authors test an additional hypothesis from schema theory concerning individual differences in image content. In this regard, they demonstrate, contrary to some of the literature, that better-educated respondents are more likely than less-educated respondents to cite task-relevant dispositional attributes of the leaders.

Résumé

Le phénomène de « leader » dans le vote au Canada n'a pas beaucoup retenu l'attention des chercheurs en la matière. Cet article, en se basant sur les données des études électorates nationales canadiennes de 1974, 1979, 1980 et 1984, examine comment est organisée l'image que se font les répondants des leaders des principaux partis politiques. Le thème central qui est ici développé est que les images que se font les répondants des leaders ou de l'élection en question ne sont pas typiquement idiosyncrasiques. Les images sont faconnées par un schéma prototype de leader qui affecte l'information qui est fabriquée et rappelée au sujet des leaders. Diverses implications de cette thèse sont vérifiées et entre autres qu'il y a une satisfaction commune des citoyens au sujet des images de leaders dans toute élection, et que la stabilité dans la structure des images à travers les diverses élections est evidente à la fois au niveau individuel et de la masse. Une hypothèse additionnelle de la théorie schématique concernant les différences individuelles dans la satisfaction de l'image est aussi verifiée. À cet égard, les auteurs démontrent, contrairement à une certaine littérature, que les répondants mieux éduqués sont plus suceptibles de tenir compte de dispositions relatives aux tâches comme étant plus pertinentes dans leur appréciation des leaders.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 729 - 755
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1988

References

1 See for example Regenstreif, Peter, The Diefenbaker Interlude: Parties and Voting in Canada (Toronto: Longman, 1965)Google Scholar; Winham, Gilbert R. and Cunningham, Robert B., “Party Leader Images in the 1968 Federal Election,” this JOURNAL 3 (1970), 37–55Google Scholar; Meisel, John, Working Papers On Canadian Politics (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clarke, Harold D., LeDuc, Lawrence, Jenson, Jane and Pammett, Jon H., Political Choice in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979)Google Scholar; Clarke, Harold D., LeDuc, Lawrence, Jenson, Jane and Pammett, Jon H., Absent Mandate: The Politics of Discontent (Toronto: Gage, 1984)Google Scholar; Kay, Barry J., Lambert, Ronald D., Brown, Steven D. and Curtis, James E., “The Character of Electoral Change: A Preliminary Report from the National Election Study,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, 1985Google Scholar; and Brown, Steven D., Lambert, Ronald D., Kay, Barry J. and Curtis, James E., “The 1984 Election: Explaining the Vote,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, Winnipeg, 1986.Google Scholar

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20 See Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates” as well as Lau, Richard R. and Erber, Ralph, “Political Sophistication: An Information- Processing Perspective,” in Kraus, Sidney and Perloff, Richard M. (eds.), Mass Media and Political Thought (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985), 37–64Google Scholar; or Eric Smith, R. A. N., “The Levels of Conceptualization: False Measures of Ideological Sophistication,” American Political Science Review 74 (1980), 685–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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22 In each of these surveys, identical “like-dislike” questions were asked about each of the major party leaders contesting the election. The format of these questions was as follows: “Now we would like to ask you about your impressions of the various leaders of the federal political parties, (a) Is there anything in particular that you LIKE about (leader's name)? … Anything else? (b) Is there anything in particular that you DISLIKE about (leader's name)? … Anything else?” Use of these open-ended responses for our analyses has both advantages and disadvantages. One drawback is that they provide an incomplete picture of most respondents’ cognitive images because they represent only the most salient positive and negative features of each image. More than offsetting this limitation, however, is the fact that open-ended responses are much less contaminated by the demand characteristics of the interview situation. Given that we are concerned largely with exploring the respondent's frame of reference, requiring respondents to define their own context of evaluation is a critical feature. For descriptions of the sampling designs used in these studies see Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada, 397–400, regarding 1974; and Lambert, Ronald D., Brown, Steven D., Curtis, James E., Kay, Barry J. and Wilson, John M., 1984 Canadian National Election Study Codebook (Waterloo, Ontario, 1986) regarding 1984.Google Scholar

23 See, for example, Miller, Arthur H. and Miller, Warren E., “Ideology in the 1972 Election: Myth or Reality—A Rejoinder,” American Political Science Review 70 (1976), 832–49; or Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates.”CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 To compare these leadership “visibility” rates with those found in the United States, see Kinder, Donald R. and Sears, David O., “Public Opinion and Political Action,” in Lindzey, Gardner and Aronson, Elliot (eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2 (3rd ed.; Cambridge: Knopf, 1985), 659–741.Google Scholar

25 It should be noted that in all but the 1984 survey only a random half of each sample was asked the leader “like-dislike” sequence of questions. For a description of the individual images of leaders in the 1974 survey, see Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada, chap. 7; and for the 1979 and 1980 surveys, see Clarke et al., Absent Mandate, chap. 5.

26 For an analysis of earlier American studies on this point see Kagay, Michael R. and Caldeira, Greg A., “I Like the Looks of his Face: Elements of Electoral Choice, 1952–1972,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1975; for a recent update, see Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates.”Google Scholar

27 See , Clarke et al., Political Choice in Canada, 224.Google Scholar

28 Lau, Richard R., “Political Schemata, Candidate Evaluations, and Voting Behavior,” in Lau and Sears, Political Cognition, 95–126. In this discussion Lau defines the substantive orientations or dimensions that organize political thought in terms of the various political schemata that the citizen may possess. While the schema notion may well apply to categories or dimensional thinking in this way, we will avoid confusion by reserving usage in this study to “person” and “role schemata.”Google Scholar

29 Kinder, Donald R., “Presidential Character Revisited,” paper presented to the nineteenth annual Carnegie Symposium on Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, May 1984.Google Scholar

30 In this analysis each of the four “cluster” variables for each leader has a potential range of zero to six reflecting the possibility that respondents could use attributes from that cluster for each of their three “likes” and each of their three “dislikes.” For this and all subsequent analyses, findings are based on and reported for the Liberal, Progressive Conservative and New Democratic party leaders only. The Créditiste leaders, Caouette (1974) and Roy (1979 and 1980), have been excluded primarily because of their low public visibility resulting in little variation in each of the dependent measures. Caouette's name elicited comments from 46 per cent of the 1974 sample while Roy's name elicited comments from 11 per cent of the 1979 sample and 14 per cent of the 1980 sample.

31 In strict methodological terms, factor analysis is not the proper technique for this task in that the four attribute cluster variables for any one leader are not independent of each other. Nevertheless, we employ it here because it summarizes the latent patterns very effectively and the bias introduced by their modest interdependence acts to inhibit rather than to facilitate emergence of the hypothesized and obtained factor structure (that is, factors defined in terms of attribute clusters).

32 A subset of the 1974 sample was reinterviewed in 1979 and 1980 as part of the election studies of those years. With half-sampling for the leader “like-dislike” questions at each point in time, the effective weighted sample size of the 1974–1979 panel was 616, and for the 1979–1980 panel it was 817.

33 For an overview of this body of literature see Hastie, Reid, “Schematic Principles in Human Memory,” in Higgins et al., Social Cognition, 39–88.Google Scholar

34 Lau, , “Political Schemata, Candidate Evaluations, and Voting Behavior,” 104–07.Google Scholar

35 Miller, et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” 528–29.Google Scholar

36 The 1974 and 1979 surveys included a sequence of open-ended questions regarding respondents' likes and dislikes toward each political party. The format of these questions was identical to that used for the leader “like-dislike” sequence (see note 22, above). The “verbosity” measure employed here is the total number of comments offered by each respondent about all three parties. In the 1974–1979 comparisons, the 1974 party “like-dislike” sequence has been used; in the 1979–1980 comparisons, the 1979 sequence has been used.

37 Fiske, Susan T., Kinder, Donald R. and Larter, W. Michael, “The Novice and the Expert: Knowledge-Based Strategies in Political Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 19 (1983), 381–400.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 See Converse, , “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” and Miller et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates.”Google Scholar

39 Miller, et al., “Schematic Assessments of Presidential Candidates,” 530–33.Google Scholar

40 See Converse, , “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.”Google Scholar

41 With one exception the variables for each election period have been constructed in a manner consistent with the practice of Miller and his associates: the education variable is trichotomized so that l=less than high school diploma, 2=high school diploma, and 3=at least some post-secondary education; political interest reflects the respondent's answer (l =not much at all, 2=fairly, 3=very) to the question, “Do you pay much attention to politics generally—that is, from day to day, when there isn't a big election campaign going on? Would you say that you follow politics very closely, fairly closely or not much at all?”; partisan intensity reflects the respondent's answer (1 =not very, 2=fairly, 3=very) to the question, “How strongly (party named) do you feel, very strongly, fairly strongly, or not very strongly,” with nonidentifiers coded 1; media usage reflects an average of the responses (l =never, 2 =seldom, 3 =sometimes, 4=often) to the questions: How often do you “read about politics in the newspapers and magazines?,” and “watch programmes about politics on TV?”; finally, with the exception of 1980, verbosity is measured as described in note 36. Since the leader and party “like-dislike” sequences were asked of opposite half-samples in 1980, the 1980 “verbosity” measure has been constructed from respondents' 1979 party evaluations.

42 It might be argued that this test is flawed in that there are actually three measures of expertise involved in the equation—partisan intensity and media exposure as well as political interest—which have distorted the effects of any one or a combination of them. However, analyses not reported here which include only one of these three variables, or a previously unused behavioural measure of involvement, in each case fail to register significant “expertise” effects with education and verbosity controlled.

43 The effect of out-of-role behaviour on the trait attribution process has been well-documented in the attribution literature of the past two decades. For a recent review of that research see Ross, Michael and Fletcher, Garth J. O., “Attribution and Social Perception,” in Lindzey and Aronson, Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2, 73–122.Google Scholar

44 This possibility is discussed in Fiske's analysis of piecemeal and schematic information processing. See Fiske, , “Schema-based versus Piecemeal Politics.”Google Scholar

45 The theoretical basis for this “enrichment” thesis is Kelley, Harold H., Causal Schemata and the Attribution Process (Morristown, N.J.: General Learning Press, 1972), which develops the analogy between naive information-processing and n-way analysis of variance.Google Scholar

46 See Zajonc, R. B., “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35 (1980), 151–75; and Kinder, “Presidential Character Revisited,” 250–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar