Partisanship and the dynamics of “candidate centered politics” in American presidential nominations

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

“…In addition, party affiliations are increasingly knitted to ideological divisions between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats (Levendusky, 2009). Related to this, Barker et al (2006) find that Democratic primary voters place greatest emphasis on perceived candidate compassion, whereas Republican primary voters rely on perceived candidate virtue. 4 Together these findings comprise a rival explanation to the ideology prediction outlined above: Voters could possibly be inferring the party of a fictitious candidate based on stereotypic associations of Republicans and Democrats with powerful and warm personalities, respectively.…”

“…This eliminates the effects of partisanship on overall candidate evaluation and permits the key test of my prediction: Whether mere personality descriptions of a fictitious candidate as either powerful or warm evoke different reactions among conservatives and liberals. 4 Barker et al (2006) build their hypotheses on different value priorities among Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Consequently, their study does not distinguish between whether the heterogeneous candidate personality preferences are driven by ideological predispositions or by processes of partisanship and stereotypes.…”

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

“…We therefore investigate how consistent the aggregate pattern is when it is broken down to candidate party and separate elections. First, we follow Barker et al (2006) and investigate the importance of competence, warmth, leadership and integrity for Republican and Democratic candidates separately. Most importantly, warmth constitutes a stronger predictor than competence for both Republican and Democratic candidates in relation to feeling thermometer ratings and vote choice.…”

“…In this regard, future research might benefit from investigating how evaluations of candidates across and within party lines might differ. We suspect that data from the nomination stage could constitute a fruitful starting point for such analyses (see alsoBarker et al, 2006).…”

Values as Heuristics: Core Beliefs and Voter Sophistication in the 2000 Republican Nomination Contest

“…Rahn et al ., 1994). To the degree that perceptions of character are driven by political values or policy attitudes ("he seems to agree with me, so he must have integrity"), they are merely proxies for these other constructs (see Barker et al ., 2006). And to the degree that character perceptions are a true independent variable, they facilitate a type of voting distinct from representation grounded in a congruence of political belief.…”