ELECTION CAMPAIGNS, SOCIAL COMMUNICATION, AND THE ACCESSIBILITY OF PERCEIVED DISCUSSANT PREFERENCE

This paper examines the communication of political preferences between citizens during the course of an election campaign. me are particular ly concerned with the ability of individuals to make judgments regardi ng the likely votes of others within their networks of relationships. To this end, we employ the concept of accessibility and its measuremen t device-response latency or response time-in the context of a compute r-assisted telephone interview We argue that the accessibility of resp ondent perceptions regarding the voting preferences of their associate s depends on a range of individual and contextual factors, and the ana lysis focuses on variation across individuals, across relationships, a nd across the temporal contexts of election campaigns.