Choosing the Right Candidate: Observational and Experimental Evidence that Conservatives and Liberals Prefer Powerful and Warm Candidate Personalities, Respectively

Abstract

A comprehensive literature relates voters' electoral decisions to their perceptions of candidates' personalities. Yet the mechanisms through which voters are attracted to certain candidates and not to others remain largely unresolved. To answer this question, this article integrates two recent interdisciplinary insights. First, leader and candidate preferences are found to be strongly dependent on levels of contextual conflict. Second, individual differences in political ideology are shown to be rooted in fundamental psychological orientations leading conservatives and liberals to perceive society in fundamentally different ways: Conservatives tend to perceive the social world as dangerous and threatening, whereas liberals to a larger degree see society as a safe place characterized by cooperation. Based on this, it is predicted that conservatives and liberals will also prefer different candidate personalities. Specifically, conservatives are predicted to value candidate power and "strong leadership" more than liberals, whereas liberals are predicted to value candidate warmth more than conservatives. The prediction is supported observationally using the 1984-2008 American National Election Studies and experimentally in two original experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. Consequences and scope conditions for trait-based voting are discussed.

The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity

“…Funk, 1999). Previous studies show the existence of party-based trait ownerships (Hayes, 2005;Goren, 2007) and that specific traits such as leadership are weighted more heavily in contexts of threat (Merolla & Zechmeister, 2009) and by conservative voters (Laustsen, 2016). Relatedly, we distinguish between main categories of character traits to show that in general, across many elections, warmth predicts global evaluations and vote choice more strongly than other traits.…”

“…Second, interdisciplinary research on leadership provides growing evidence that leader and candidate evaluations utilize different cognitive systems than social or partner evaluations in general (Little et al 2007;Laustsen andPetersen, 2015, 2017). In particular, contexts of threat and conflict are shown to increase preferences for dominant leaders but not for dominant friends (Laustsen and Petersen, 2015).…”

“…"Although there is a seemingly infinite number of traits available in ordinary language, the most common traits used to characterize politicians tend to fall into a limited number of categories: competence ('intelligent,' 'hard working'), leadership ('inspiring,' '[not] weak'), integrity M A N U S C R I P T A C C E P T E D ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT 4 ('honest,' 'moral'), and empathy ('compassionate,' 'cares about people')" (McGraw, 2011: p. 190; see also McAllister, 2016; Bartels, 2002;Hayes, 2005;Laustsen, 2016 for studies applying similar frameworks).…”

Perceived Conflict and Leader Dominance: Individual and Contextual Factors Behind Preferences for Dominant Leaders

“…This research shows that contextual factors related to threat and conflict are important factors for preferences for dominant leadership; hence, candidates' provision of strong leadership as well as dominant (i.e., masculine) candidate faces are more preferred under contexts of threat and intergroup conflict than under contexts of peace and cooperation (e.g., Little, Burriss, Jones, & Roberts, ; Merolla & Zechmeister, ; Spisak, Homan, Grabo, & Van Vugt, ). In terms of individual factors, this research shows that political ideology is similarly important: Conservatives have stronger preferences for dominant and tough leaders than do liberals, both in terms of leadership style and leaders' physical appearance (Barker, Lawrence, & Tavits, ; Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, ; Laustsen, in press; Laustsen & Petersen, ).…”

How voters assess elite-educated politicians: A survey experiment

“…Because of the salience of the left-right divide in reflecting these values, we identify ideology as the main gradient along which voters will differentially assess elite-and non-elite-educated politicians. This intuition builds on research showing that whether one is liberal or conservative is a prime force behind how people interpret social hierarchies (e.g., Duckitt and Sibley, 2010;Jost, Federico, and Napier, 2009;Jost et al, 2003;Rathbun, 2007 ) and judge candidate traits (e.g., Goren, 2007;Laustsen, 2017).…”