A Model of Political Judgment: An Agent-Based Simulation of Candidate Evaluation

This paper advances Kim, Taber, and Lodge's work (2010). Specifically, it is shown here that the psychological model of political judgment proposed by Kim et al (2010) is consistent with a set of well-known empirical regularities repeatedly found in electoral and psychological researches, that the model in general implies motivated reasoning - discounting contradictory information to the prior while accepting consistent information more or less at its face value - under general conditions, and that (prior) evaluative affect towards candidates plays a fundamental role in this process. It is also discussed the implication of motivated reasoning in accounting for the responsiveness, persistence, and polarization of candidate evaluation often observed in elections.