Making sense of candidates: partisanship, ideology, and issues as guides to judgment.

Citizens employ a range of heuristic devices in reaching judgments and making evaluations regarding political candidates and issues. This paper examines the circumstances that lead to the use of multiple and potentially competing heuristics in making complex decisions. In our analysis, subjects systematically demonstrate evidence of confusion regarding particular combinations of partisan, ideological, and issue-based heuristics--a difficulty in disentangling partisan, ideological, and issue-based criteria in the evaluation of candidates.