What Voters Want: Reactions to Candidate Characteristics in a Survey Experiment
| Published date | 01 December 2014 |
| Date | 01 December 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.12048 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
What Voters Want: Reactions to Candidate
Characteristics in a Survey Experiment
Rosie Campbell
Birkbeck, University of London
Philip Cowley
University of Nottingham
There has been extensive research into the extent to which voters utilise shor t 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, relig ion,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, relig ion, 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 experiments
We 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 sophisti-
cated literature looking at some types of candidate characteristic, of which by far the most
common are biological sex and race.But other character istics are much less studied, and the
majority of the literature draws on data from one country, the United States.1
Traditionally, and for good reasons, electoral studies in countries such as the United
Kingdom were especially dismissive about the impor tance of anything that occurred below
the level of the national campaign.Elections were seen as national events, in which national
campaigns produced nationwide vote swings.A combination of an electorate divided along
class lines (Butler and Stokes, 1974) and an electoral system that did not create strong
incentives to cultivate a personal vote (Carey and Shugart, 1995) led to talk of local or
candidate effects being dismissed as a failure to understand psephological reality. But with
the decline in partisan and class alignment (Crewe et al., 1977; Mughan, 2009; Särlvik and
Crewe, 1983) and increasing evidence of variations in constituency behaviour, var ious local
or candidate characteristics are coming to be seen as more important.2Indeed, not only are
British elections becoming increasingly localised – with the potential for candidate effects
to have a greater impact than in the past – but also the issue of candidate‘representativeness’
has become a politically live one, with all the major political par ties making efforts to
improve the diversity of their candidates (Cowley, 2013), with the potential for electoral
contests to feature a greater heterogeneity of candidate types in future.
Just as in the US, however, most of the work on candidate characteristics in the UK has
focused on a relatively narrow range of characteristics, with sex and race being the most
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doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12048
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014 VOL 62, 745–765
© 2013The Authors. Political Studies published byJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Political Studies Association.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits use,
distribution and reproduction in any medium,provided the original work is properly cited.
studied.Women candidates in Britain generally now face little discrimination from voters,
although selectorates are often not as progressive in their behaviour (Norr is and
Lovenduski, 1995; Shepherd-Robinson and Lovenduski, 2002). Research has shown that
some of the US findings, where in some cases women do seem to be more likely to vote
for women candidates, do not apply to the Br itish case (Campbell and Cutts, 2009); and
some experimental research indicates that male candidates may be more popular with
Conservative voters (Johns and Shephard, 2008). There are also a number of studies that
have looked at race/ethnicity and candidate preference in Br itain (Fisher et al., 2011; Norris
et al., 1992; Saggar, 1998).
One surprisingly understudied topic is that of residency. Despite a growing focus on the
local campaign (Denver and Hands, 1997; Denver et al., 2002; Fisher et al., 2007), a
widespread acknowledgement within British political parties that being a local candidate
can be an asset, some evidence that the number of MPs with local roots is on the increase
(Childs and Cowley, 2011; Johnson and Rosenblatt, 2007) and that voters say they value
local MPs (Cowley, 2013; Johnson and Rosenblatt, 2007), there has been relatively little
examination of whether this can be an electoral asset (Arzheimer and Evans, 2012).3Other
candidate characteristics – such as their education, their occupation, their age and so on –
are even more infrequently, if ever, discussed.
Moreover, even those candidate characteristics about which we have some knowledge are
rarely compared to others, to measure their relative impact on voters. Even the highly
developed literature on the influence of candidate race and sex in the US, for example,does
not compare the size of its effects to other significant biographical information about
candidates.The analysis in this article therefore reports findings from a survey experiment
testing the impact of candidate characteristics in a low-information context in Britain. The
experiments examine the relative importance of six different types of candidate cue.These
include some of electoral studies’ hardy perennials – such as biological sex – but we
deliberately examine the effect of a wider range of cues than in extant studies.4The
experiments appear to reveal that many of the social information variables that academics
have researched are in fact relatively unimportant, while also revealing sizeable differences
triggered by background factors that have previously been largely ignored by researchers.
Methods
Experimental methods are becoming increasingly popular in research examining candidate
evaluations (Birch and Allen, 2011; Druckman et al., 2006; Huddy and Terkildsen, 1993;
Rosenberg and McCafferty, 1987; Sanbonmatsu, 2002). They allow us to separate out
confounding effects much more neatly than is possible using ordinary survey methods
(Mutz, 2011). Moreover, although some observable candidate characteristics – such as
biological sex – can be relatively easily coded up, others (such as ‘localness’or race) are much
more difficult to code definitively. In addition,the fog of electoral war makes it very difficult
to know what information voters have actually received about candidates. Survey experi-
ments thus offer the opportunity to model hypothetical races, giving us insights into the
priorities of voters that are not possible with conventional survey or observational data.
The creation of electronic survey companies has also made population survey exper i-
ments noticeably more affordable and manageable. This is par ticularly useful when using
746 ROSIE CAMPBELL AND PHILIP COWLEY
© 2013The Authors. Political Studies published byJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2014, 62(4)
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