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	Candidate Evaluation Model	Feeling Thermometer Analysis
Field	Political Psychology	Political Psychology
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	1964
Originator	Milton Lodge, Marco Steenbergen & Donald Kinder	American National Election Studies / Aage Clausen
Type	Latent evaluation model	Affect rating instrument
Seminal source	Lodge, M., Steenbergen, M. R., & Brau, S. (1995). The responsive voter: Campaign information and the dynamics of candidate evaluation. American Political Science Review, 89(2), 309-326.	Wilcox, C., Sigelman, L., & Cook, E. (1989). Some like it hot: Individual differences in responses to group feeling thermometers. Public Opinion Quarterly, 53(2), 246-257.
Aliases	Impression-Driven Evaluation Model, Online Processing Model, Candidate Trait Evaluation Model	Feeling Thermometer, Affect Thermometer, Thermometer Rating Scale
Related	4	4
Summary	A candidate evaluation model represents how voters form overall assessments of political candidates as a latent function of perceived traits (competence, leadership, integrity, empathy), partisanship, issue proximity, and affect. It spans the trait-based factor models of Kinder et al. (1980) and the online-processing tally model of Lodge, Steenbergen and Brau (1995), which describes evaluation as a running summary updated as information arrives.	The feeling thermometer is a survey instrument that asks respondents to rate their warmth or favorability toward a person, group, or institution on a 0-to-100 scale, where 0 is very cold/unfavorable, 100 is very warm/favorable, and 50 is neutral. Introduced in the American National Election Studies in the 1960s, it is the standard measure of political affect, and its analysis underpins candidate evaluation, group affect, and affective-polarization research.