The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns

The Reasoning Voter is an insiders look at campaigns candidates media and voters that convincingly argues that voters make informed logical choices. Samuel L. Popkin analyzes three primary campaignsCarter in 1976; Bush and Reagan in 1980; and Hart Mondale and Jackson in 1984to arrive at a new model of the way voters sort through commercials and sound bites to choose a candidate. Drawing on insights from economics and cognitive psychology he convincingly demonstrates that as trivial as campaigns often appear they provide voters with a surprising amount of information on a candidates views and skills. For all their shortcomings campaigns do matter. "Professor Popkin has brought V.O. Keys contention that voters are rational into the media age. This book is a useful rebuttal to the cynical view that politics is a wholly contrived business in which unscrupulous operatives manipulate the emotions of distrustful but gullible citizens. The reality he shows is both more complex and more hopeful than that."David S. Broder The Washington Post