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	Feeling Thermometer Analysis	Candidate Evaluation Model
Field	Political Psychology	Political Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Latent structure
Year of origin	1964	1995
Originator	American National Election Studies / Aage Clausen	Milton Lodge, Marco Steenbergen & Donald Kinder
Type	Affect rating instrument	Latent evaluation model
Seminal source	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.	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.
Aliases	Feeling Thermometer, Affect Thermometer, Thermometer Rating Scale	Impression-Driven Evaluation Model, Online Processing Model, Candidate Trait Evaluation Model
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	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.