The predictive benefits of importance: Do issue importance ratings improve the prediction of political attitudes?

Using data collected in Arizona during the 2000 Presidential election, this study explores whether expectancy value (EV) models predicting attitudes toward candidates and toward voting for candidates can be improved by incorporating measures of issue importance. More specifically, attitudes toward candidates were predicted from beliefs about the candidates' stands on 8 issues, and attitudes toward voting for the candidates were predicted from beliefs that voting for a candidate would lead to the implementation of the 8 issue positions. Ratings of the importance of the 8 issues were used to develop several different EV models. The results of our study indicate that importance ratings do not add much to the EV model's prediction of attitudes.