The connection between political leaders and vote choice is key to contemporary electoral studies. Although partly endogenous, this connection points to the importance of leader support as a political attitude. In cros-sectional terms, levels of support for in-party leaders should be conditional on the voters’ degrees of partisanship and political involvement. From a longitudinal perspective, however, it is much less clear among what group of party voters leader support is more likely to increase over the campaign period. To fill this gap, we propose a framework for analysis of patterns of leader support based on four well-established mechanisms (resistance, reactivation, persuasion, inattentiveness) of information processing. While the co-presence of high or low partisanship and sophistication should trigger attitude stability, we expect asymmetric interactions to favor attitude change. We use the 2013 ITANES rolling cros-ssection CAWI survey to test this hypothesis in the context of the 2013 general election in Italy.
