Awareness, Partisanship and the Post-Convention Bounce: A Memory-Based Model of Post- Convention Presidential Candidate Evaluations Part II—Empirical Results

This paper continues an analysis, begun in the December 2004 issue, that employed panel data to estimate the effects of awareness and political partisanship on post-convention candidate evaluations. The derivation of a theoretical framework was discussed in Part 1 [1]. Empirical results using data from the US presidential election of 2000 are discussed in the present article. We find that partisans of the opposite party were more resistant to the convention message of Bush than Gore, that awareness played a greater role in determining a predicted post-convention change for Gore, and that Gore’s message was received and accepted at a higher rate than Bush’s message. I. EMPIRICAL RESULTS The dependent variable in the present analysis will be the post-convention feeling thermometer for both candidates and we will use the pre-convention feeling thermometer as an independent variable. Survey Respondents were asked, “On a scale of 0 to 100 how would you rate (Candidate)? Zero means very unfavorable and 100 means very favorable. Fifty means you do not feel favorable or unfavorable. If you don’t know enough about the person to rate him just let me know.” Thus, the feeling thermometer is a variable that goes from 0 to 100, and will be treated as an interval variable [2]. a. Description of the Data Set The data we will use in estimating Equation 3 of our Part 1 analysis [1] come from two panel studies from the National Annenberg Election Survey surrounding the 2000 nominating conventions. The participants in the study samples were interviewed before and after the Republican and Democratic convention. The Republican sample contains 1,197 respondents, while the Democratic convention sample contains 1,230. However, due to the nature of the analysis, respondents who did not evaluate a candidate in both interviews were eliminated from our analysis of that specific candidate. This reduces to 1,146 and 1,154 respondents for Bush and Gore respectively for the GOP convention. For the Democratic convention, both Bush and Gore samples had 1,186 respondents both before and after the convention. The choice independent variables in our analysis consist of two indices: awareness and ideological/partisan strength. The awareness index that we have constructed contains eight items: an interviewer evaluation of respondent knowledge, a test to see if the respondent can correctly place George W. Bush and Al Gore in the correct space along a left-right