A Leader Who Sees the World as I Do: Voters Prefer Candidates Whose Statements Reveal Matching Social‐Psychological Attitudes

Abstract

Politicians are increasingly able to communicate their values, attitudes, and concerns directly to voters. Yet little is known about which of these signals resonate with voters and why. We employ a discrete choice experiment to investigate whether and which social‐psychological attitudes predict how adult British voters respond to corresponding attitudinal signals communicated by candidates in hypothetical social media posts. For all attitudes studied, covering social feelings (trust, collective nostalgia), social perceptions (nationalism, populist sentiment), and social commitments (national identification, authoritarianism, egalitarianism), we find that participants are much more likely to vote for candidates who signal proximity to their own attitudinal position and less likely for candidates who signal opposing views. The strongest effects were observed for national identification, authoritarianism, and egalitarianism, indicating the importance of commitment to a shared group and to particular principles for distributing power and resources within and between groups. We further demonstrate that social‐psychological attitudes are not acting as mere proxies for participants' past votes or left–right ideology. Our results extend adaptive followership theory to incorporate preferences concerning intragroup coordination and intergroup hierarchy, while highlighting the social‐psychological dynamics of political communication that may transcend the concerns of particular election cycles.

Who favor in-group politicians? In-group voting in France, Germany and the Netherlands and the challenges to the descriptive and substantive representation of Muslims

“…Meanwhile, high-status groups might also exhibit social creativity by exhibiting how big-hearted they are by showing that policy matters more to them and that they are not racist, but colorblind and moreover, value policy over identity in political representation. Indeed, although there is not much research comparing the descriptive and substantive representation directly, the few existing studies find that policy matters more than identity (Holman, Merolla, and Zechmeister 2016;Schneider and Bos 2016;Goodyear-Grant and Croskill 2011), such as when researchers add partisanship to the experimental design and find that it "crowds out" identity (Kirkland and Coppock 2018), even in within-party leadership races, arguably a least likely case (Wauters et al 2022;Baron, Lauderdale, and Sheehy-Skeffington 2023) . A major caveat of the above studies is that they do not oversample minority groups and therefore mostly study the white majority.…”

Direct Replication and Additional Sensitivity and Robustness Analyses for Frederiksen (2022): A Replication Report from the Nottingham Replication Games

“…We begin by re-running the analysis files provided as part of the paper's replication package. 2 This portion of the analysis was originally performed entirely in Stata. There are two scripts provided in the replication package.…”