Voting for Change

While rational choice and political theory show that attitudes influence voting decisions, voting decisions might also influence attitudes, which could lead to political polarization. Choice induced attitude change, the phenomenon causing such attitude change, has consistently been found in the general (non-political) domain. The results of research on this topic in the political domain are less consistent, and often contradict each other. This thesis adds to the literature for this domain by conducting an experiment rather than studying an existing dataset, and it adds the potentially moderating factor of attitude importance. In an internet-based survey, participants rate their attitude extremity and importance, and subsequently vote for a party. While attitude change was expected to be higher for voters than for non-voters, no such effect was found. Similarly, no effect was found for the expected moderating influence of attitude importance.