Rising numbers of late deciders and floating voters are two closely interrelated consequences of party dealignment affecting most contemporary democracies. Classical studies of campaign effects have imputed activation and conversion effects to these voters, usually characterized by weak partisan predispositions and low political involvement. However, the more recent cognitive mobilization thesis suggests that a different - and possibly more complex - combination of individual factors and social mechanisms might drive the behavior of last-minute vote switchers. This paper analyzes how both late deciding and last-minute vote switching are affected by a set of key individual-level attitudinal moderators in interaction with varying levels of campaign intensity and changing contents of media coverage. We test our set of hypotheses within a comparative framework (2013 general elections in Germany and Italy) combining the GLES and ITANES rolling cross section campaign surveys and the respective campaign media content analyses.
