What Voters Want: Reactions to Candidate Characteristics in a Survey Experiment

Abstract

There has been extensive research into the extent to which voters utilise short cuts based on gender and race stereotypes when evaluating candidates, but relatively little is known about how they respond to other background characteristics.We compare the impact of candidates' sex, religion, age, education, occupation and location/residence through a survey experiment in which respondents rate two candidates based on short biographies. We find small differences in the ratings of candidates in response to sex, religion, age and education cues but more sizeable effects are apparent for the candidate's occupation and place of residence. Even once we introduce a control for political party into our experimental scenarios the effect of candidate's place of residence continues to have a sizeable impact on candidate evaluations. Our research suggests that students of electoral behaviour should pay attention to a wider range of candidate cues. Keywords: candidate evaluations; candidate traits; survey experimentsWe know relatively little about what socio-demographic characteristics voters value in election candidates -and the extent to which short cuts based on stereotypes matter when it comes to the way candidates are viewed by voters.The literature on candidate effects is large, but it is also partial and geographically skewed. There is a voluminous and sophisticated literature looking at some types of candidate characteristic, of which by far the most common are biological sex and race. But other characteristics are much less studied, and the majority of the literature draws on data from one country, the United States.

Gender and Politics in Northern Ireland: The Representation Gap Revisited

“…This finding is stronger than the one recently obtained in experimental research conducted with British voters (Campbell and Cowley 2013), which tested the impact of a range of candidate characteristics, including sex, on voter choice. The nature of electoral contests in Northern Ireland, which are fought within two ethnic blocks (and so parties within each block need to find a way of differentiating themselves from their nearest rival) and in multi-member constituencies (which places a premium on localism), may contribute to this stronger sex finding in Northern Ireland.…”

What Makes a Good Politician? Reassessing the Criteria Used for Political Recruitment

“…The perceived sex of the candidate influences how voters evaluate candidates' traits and policy strengths, with women considered warmer and more honest, while men are seen as tougher and more rational (Alexander and Andersen 1993;Huddy and Terkildsen 1993). Other studies have identified strong voter preference for candidates who are local (Campbell and Cowley 2014a;Górecki and Marsh 2012), indicating that voters want geographical descriptive representation. Yet, emphasizing localism can been used to close ranks against 'outsiders' such as female or ethnic minority candidates (Cowley 2013).…”

Voting for locals: Voters’ information processing strategies in open-list PR systems

“…In addition, the studies by Evans (2012, 2014) and Gorecki and Marsh (2012) focus on the question of how candidate-voter distance affects candidate choice in UK and Irish elections. All these studies come to the conclusion that localness matters (see also Campbell and Cowley, 2014 for a survey experiment on the impact localness). However, of all these studies only the example of Estonia analyzed by Tavits (2010) is about open-list PR systems.…”