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Previous research has demonstrated that in low-information elections voters compensate for a lack of information by taking informational short-cuts, based on candidate cues, to make voting decisions. To date, this research has focused on candidate party identification and incumbency cues. This article argues that candidate demographic cues, specifically race and gender, also play an influential role. Unlike past psychological research that focuses on potential voter bias against women or black candidates, this article examines the informational content of voters' stereotypes about women and black candidates, and how these stereotypes affect voting behavior. I use quasi-experimental data from the Los Angeles Times Poll to demonstrate that candidate gender and candidate race signal voters in two different ways. Voters stereotype candidates ideologically: women and black candidates are stereotyped as more liberal than the average white male. Voters also stereotype candidates on issues: black candidates are seen as more concerned with minority rights than whites; while women candidates are viewed as more dedicated to honest government. As a result, voters choose candidates for office based on how much they agree or disagree with the ideological and issue positions they attribute, through stereotyping, to candidates.

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Voters in low-information elections frequently rely on heuristics or information shortcuts when making their decisions of whom to support. While existing research on these shortcuts has examined many candidate characteristics, it has largely overlooked the potential of candidate occupational cues. This article uses experimental survey data conducted by the Los Angeles Times Poll in the 1994 statewide elections in California to analyze whether candidates' occupational ballot designations influence voters' choices. Specifically, it hypothesizes that voters use candidate occupational labels to infer candidates' competence or qualifications for the office in question. As the analysis demonstrates, candidate occupational cues have two simultaneous effects on voting behavior: they help voters make a decision in races where they otherwise might not have, decreasing abstention; and in races in which voters infer one candidate to have a qualification advantage, the addition of occupational designations makes voters more likely to support that candidate.Voters in low-information electoral situations frequently rely on cues or heuristics to aid them in making a decision between unfamiliar candidates. Specifically, voters have been shown to take personal information about the candidates and infer from it political information with which they can take a shortcut to an "informed" voting decision (Popkin 1991). Candidate characteristics such as gender (McDermott 1997), race (McDermott 1998Sigelman et al. 1995), and even sexual orientation (Golebiowska 2001; Herrick and Thomas 1999) all function in this manner.One potential source of inferential information, however, has been almost entirely overlooked in the existing literature on voter heuristics-candidate occupation. While a few early studies have examined potential positive or negative effects of given occupations (e.g., Byrne and Pueschell 1974), to date none has examined occupational cues as a potential source of voter information shortcuts.There is good reason to believe that candidate occupations can operate as heuristics for voters in low-information contests. First, the information may be readily available to voters. And second, the relevance of previous experience to future performance may make voters likely to rely on inferred information of this kind.

While much important research exists on the topic of religion and politics, very little exists on candidate religious affiliation and its potential effect on voters' behavior. This article addresses the issue of candidate religion from the point of view that it acts as an information cue for voters in elections through trait and belief stereotypes. Using a case study of hypothetical evangelical Christian candidates and an original experimental data set, this analysis demonstrates that voters stereotype evangelicals as more conservative than other candidates, as well as more competent and trustworthy, all else equal. These stereotypes subsequently play a significant role in voters' choices of whom to support.