Citizens in contemporary democracies learn about politics and make political decisions based largely on the information provided by political intermediaries, such as relatives and friends, the media, and social groups. This research investigation explores the intermediation process in the 1992 American presidential election. The investigators utilize a mixed research design which combines an intensive local study with a national study. In both the local and national studies, interviews will be conducted with a sample of citizens and their personal discussants. The content of the newspapers they read also will be analyzed. The local study, moreover, will include an examination of the activity of key secondary organizations in the community and how it impinges upon citizens. The current investigation is distinguished from prior investigations both in its examination of the full complement of intermediaries and in its merging of citizen perceptions of the intermediation process with information directly collected from the intermediaries themselves. In addition, this research is part of a collaborative five-nation study of intermediation that enables the investigators to place the American findings in a cross- national context, thereby identifying the regularities and anomalies of intermediation within advanced industrial societies. The study lies at the nexus of several of the central research issues of contemporary political behavior and will generate a model of the intermediation process that describes the citizen's relationship to the political world and how it affects the nature of citizen electoral decision making.
