¹ Kingdon, John W., “Politicians' Beliefs About Voters,” American Political Science Review, 61 (March, 1967), 137–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his book, Candidates For Office: Beliefs and Strategies (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar.

² Kingdon, , “Politicians' Beliefs,” 139–42Google Scholar.

³ See, for example, Festinger, Leon, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (New York: Row, Peterson, 1957)Google Scholar; Festinger, Leon and Carlsmith, J. M., “Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58 (March, 1959), 203–10CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Zajonc, Robert B., “The Concepts of Balance, Congruity, and Dissonance,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 24 (Summer, 1960), 380–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brehm, Jack W. and Cohen, Arthur R., Explorations in Cognitive Dissonance (New York: John Wiley, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Denmark, Florence L. and Ritter, Brunhilde, “Differential Cognitive Dissonance and Decision Latency,” The Journal of Social Psychology, 86 (February, 1972), 69–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Political theorists have attributed various functions to elections. Elections have been considered as devices for selecting leaders and legitimizing the regime, means of giving the citizens direct and indirect control over government policies, channels for the expression of public choices, and links between officials and the voting public through which influence is exchanged. However, cognitive effects of elections such as the one stated in this hypothesis have not been explicitly formulated as part of the functions of elections. See, for example, Rose, Richard and Mossawir, Harve, “Voting and Elections: A Functional Analysis,” Political Studies, 15 (June, 1967), 173–201 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pomper, Gerald, Elections in America (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968), pp. 16–40 Google Scholar.

⁵ Friedrich, Carl J., Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1950), p. 49 Google Scholar.

⁶ Kingdon, , “Politicians' Beliefs,” pp. 144–45Google Scholar.

⁷ The “congratulation-rationalization” hypothesis involves changes in candidates' beliefs and the direction of such changes. To test the hypothesis, one needs data on attitude changes. Interview data collected at a single point in time, the kind of data used in Kingdon's study, do not provide an adequate basis to test the hypothesis.

⁸ Certain typical problems are associated with the use of mail surveys. Briefly, these problems relate to the type of data which can be gathered, the type of respondents who can be reached, and the response rate. In the present study, these problems were recognized and dealt with as fully as possible. First, the questionnaire used was brief, and the questions asked were simple and straightforward. Moreover, many of our questions had been used in several previous studies and their reliability had been tested. Second, our respondents were an ideal sample for a mail survey. They were candidates for public office, a relatively well-educated and articulate group. We found almost no “nonresponses” in the returned questionnaires. Finally, the response rate for the pre- and postelection surveys were impressive. For a good discussion of the problems associated with the use of mail surveys, see Goode, William J. and Hatt, Paul K., Methods in Social Research (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952), pp. 170–83Google Scholar.

⁹ This figure represents all contested candidates who ran in the 1970 general election in Iowa. There were also 32 candidates who were unopposed in the election. We did not include these unopposed candidates in our survey.

¹⁰ Kingdon, , “Politicians' Beliefs,” 137–38Google Scholar.

¹¹ Dexter, Lewis A., The Sociology and Politics of Congress (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), pp. 151–75Google Scholar; Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., “Constituency Influence in Congress,” American Political Science Review, 57 (March, 1963), 45–56 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² See Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E., and Stokes, Donald, The American Voter (New York: John Wiley, 1960)Google Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Gurin, Gerald and Miller, Warren E., The Voter Decides (Evanston: Row, Peterson, 1954)Google Scholar; and RePass, David E., “Issue Salience and Party Choice,” American Political Science Review, 65 (June, 1971), 389–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ We are making a number of assumptions here. Stated explicitly, (1) we assume that when a candidate rates candidate characteristics as the most important factor, he is congratulating himself and the voters, and (2) we assume that when a candidate rates party labels as first in importance, he is rationalizing his defeat by blaming voters for blindly voting for party. These are the assumptions which Kingdon has made in his study. We recognize at this point that another plausible assumption which contradicts our first assumption can be made: when a candidate rates candidate characteristics as the most important factor, he might be downgrading the voters. To believe that the voters make their choices on the basis of candidates' personal characteristics could mean that a candidate is disparaging their political sophistication. However, our objective is to test the validity of Kingdon's hypothesis and therefore we adopted his assumptions. See his “Politicians' Beliefs About Voters,” pp. 139–40.

¹⁴ When responses to several questions are aggregated to form a single measure as was the case in our summated scale, we might be in effect losing some information. Therefore we have also scrutinized responses to individual questions. The results of the item-by-item analysis did not change our basic arguments. See Racheter, Donald P., “Representation and the Congratulation-Rationalization Effect” (M.A. thesis The University of Iowa, 1972)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The questions used were: (1) Would you indicate how important you think the candidates' issue positions are to the voters in determining their choices? (2) Generally speaking, how interested in the campaign do you think the voters in your district are? (3) How well informed do you think the voters in your district are about the candidates' issue positions? The same set of questions was repeated in the postelection survey with only the tense changed.

¹⁶ Responses to the three voter competence items were coded: (0) Not important (or informed), (1) Somewhat important (or informed), and (2) Very important (or informed). These coded responses were summed to form a simple index.

¹⁷ The measure for the direction and the magnitude of changes in candidates' perceptions regarding the competence of voters was constructed from the two summated scales of voters' competence: the pre- and postelection scales. To obtain scores for changes in candidates' perceptions, the postelection scores were subtracted from the pre-election scores.

¹⁸ Additional evidence is available. When we compared the winners and losers in terms of their pre- and postelection perceptions, we discovered as shown in Table A that the winners manifested much more favorable perceptions than the losers after the election, and that the subsequent winners also manifested significantly more favorable perceptions than the subsequent losers before the election. This means that the winners had more favorable perceptions than the losers from the outset.

¹⁹ The six types of change in the candidates' rankings include: (1) from party to issues, (2) from party to candidates, (3) from issues to party, (4) from issues to candidates, (5) from candidates to party, and (6) from candidates to issues.

²⁰ Of the six types of change, only four are directly relevant to testing predictions derived from the hypothesis. Since we assume that changes from issues or candidates to party reflect the rationalization effect and that changes from party or issues to candidates reflect the congratulation effect, we report data on these four types of change. Nevertheless, we have also examined all six types of change separately, and have found no evidence to contradict the conclusion suggested in the text.

²¹ The question was: “How do you rate your chances in the upcoming election?” Responses were coded: (1) Excellent chance to win, (2) Good chance to win, (3) Some chance to win, (4) It's a toss-up, (5) Probably will lose, and (6) Almost sure to lose.

²² The results of this analysis are reported in Table B. It is clear that no significant difference obtains between those who expected to win and those who expected to lose within each group of the winners and losers. This indicates that differences in pre-election anticipations of the election outcomes have no visible impact upon perceptions regarding the competenceof voters.

²³ Kingdon stated that: “winners develop complimentary beliefs about voters and losers develop rationalizations for the losses simply by virtue of the outcome of the election” [our emphasis]. See his “Politicians' Beliefs About Voters,” p. 142.

²⁴ The “high” and “low” dissonance groups among the winners and losers were established in the following manner:

²⁵ The data reported in Table 5 also show considerable cognitive changes for the low dissonance groups. For instance, 54 per cent of the low dissonance winners changed their perceptions in both favorable and unfavorable directions. Among the low dissonance losers, almost 72 per cent either increased or decreased in their evaluations of voters. Thus, it seems evident that factors other than dissonance states also act upon changes in the candidates' perceptions. These unidentified factors notwithstanding, the overall evidence clearly indicates that cognitive dissonance explains a large part of the variation in changes of candidates' perceptions. The problems of validating dissonance theory are succinctly discussed in Chapanis, Natalia P. and Chapanis, Alphonse, “Cognitive Dissonance: Five Years Later,” Psychological Bulletin, 61 (January, 1964), 1–22 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁶ Kingdon suggested alternative explanations based on the incumbent status of candidates and the marginality of the district. We plan to test some of these explanations in future research. See Kingdon, “Politicians' Beliefs About Voters,” pp. 142–43.