Attitude importance is a key variable in most models seeking to explain evaluations of
political parties and leaders. Unlike attitudes on less central issues, attitudes about aspects of
politics which citizens deem personally important are expected to influence their political
judgments. In this article, we propose to conceptualize the importance of attitudes as their
accessibility in memory and measure it by the time survey respondents take to answer an attitude
question. We apply this framework to the way in which issue attitudes (opinions on Europe,
immigration, etc.) influence party evaluations in the context of the 2011 Swiss parliamentary
elections. As expected, quicker responses tend to be associated with stronger relationships between
issue opinions and party evaluations. Promises and limits of this approach to conceptualizing
attitude importance are discussed.