Information and Elections

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book has evolved in two stages. The first stage of this project began with the development of my dissertation at Duke University. John Aldrich, my dissertation adviser, got me rolling on this project, and helped me bring it to successful completion. Peter Lange, while not my dissertation adviser, deserves credit for his contributions to my research and to my professional development. The remaining members ofmy dissertation committee, by sharing their unique professional and intellectual insights, greatly improved this research; I thank Robert Bates, John Brehm, and David Canon. While on the political science job market, I presented components of this research in a number of seminars. I thank seminar participants at Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University. During this period, the insights of many people were helpful: Larry Bartels, William Bianco, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Peter Feaver, Charles Franklin, Elizabeth Gerber, Paul Gronke, William Keech, Dean Lacy, Brian Loynd, Jonathan Nagler , Philip Paolino, Samuel Popkin, Wendy Rahn, Matthew Schousen, Patrick Sellers, Kenneth Shepsle, and John Zaller. The empirical work in chapters 6 and 10 were presented at successive American Political Science Association Annual Meetings (1992 and 1993). I thank Charles Franklin, Walter Mebane, and B. Dan Wood for their comments. The second stage of this project came after my arrival at the California Institute of Technology. Here I have found a perfect working environment, fantastic colleagues, and smart students. Discussions with Mark Fey, Jonathan Katz, and Tom Palfrey were important in my early revisions, and Rod Kiewiet had the patience to wade through the entire manuscript and provide written commentary. Kim Border's advice on finishing a book helped me to get the second stage of this project done, and Scott Page helped insure that I maintained some balance personally, professionally, and on the basketball court. Scott read the manuscript, and from him I got the economist's seal of approval. A set of diligent students at Caltech served as test cases for this book; I thank x Acknowledgments Tara Butterfield, Garrett Glasgow, Alvaro Gonzalez, James Honaker, Heidi King, Tony Kwasnica, Reginald Roberts, and Julie Scott for reading, discussing , and critiquing this manuscript. Throughout this process, Abby Delman , Eloisa Imel and Gail Nash provided indispensable secretarial assistance. Also, some of the material in chapter 4 was presented at seminars at the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Riverside, and at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. The comments and critiques in these three forums were enormously useful, and I thank Neal Beck, Shaun Bowler, John Ferejohn, Jonathan Katz, Skip Lupia, Mat McCubbins, Jonathan Nagler, Sam Popkin, Doug Rivers, Barbara Sinclair and Barry Weingast , for their hospitality and talks about this material. In the past two years, my collaboration with Charles Franklin on a related project has helped sharpen my theories and analysis. With his hard work and help, the direct survey-based measures of uncertainty have been included in a number of surveys, and we have analyzed their properties in joint work. Charles also read an early version of the manuscript, and provided helpful comments and advice. Malcolm DeBevoise of Princeton University Press, Larry Bartels, and an anonymous reviewer all worked hard to get this manuscript into shape and to convince me to let Princeton publish this book. I thank them for their efforts and advice. Ultimately Colin Day won the fight, and he has proved to be the perfect editor who knows the right combination of tactics to help a young scholar publish his first book. Malcolm Litchfield and then Charles Myers both provided their editorial assistance at the University of Michigan Press. I thank John Jackson and Chris Achen, editors of the series in which this book appears, for their advice and support throughout this process. On more practical matters, the survey data I utilize in this dissertation for the 1980-88 presidential elections was originally collected by the National Election Studies and was made available to me through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. Thomas Patterson collected the panel data from the 1976 presidential election which I use extensively below, and this data was made available through the ICPSR. I am grateful to Thomas Patterson for lending me the sole remaining computer tape containing the data from his 1976 content analysis of the presidential election media coverage and for his help in using this unique data. I thank Stacy Kerkela for her hard work during the summer of...