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.
Before the U.S. campaign finance system can be fixed, we first have to understand why it has developed into the system as it exists today. The nature of democracy itself, the American capitalist ...economic system, the content of the U.S. Constitution and how it is interpreted, the structure of our governmental institutions, the competition for governmental power, and the behavior of campaign finance actors have all played a role in shaping the system. The Fundamentals of Campaign Finance in the U.S. takes care to situate the campaign finance system in the context of the broader U.S. political and economic system. Dwyre and Kolodny offer readers a brief tour through the development of the campaign finance regulatory structure, highlighting the Supreme Court’s commitment to free speech over political equality from Buckley v. Valeo (1976) through the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, 2002). They also examine the driving force behind campaign finance reform—corruption—through historical, transactional, and institutional perspectives. While diving into the insufficiency of the disclosure and enforcement of campaign finance laws and calling attention to multiple federal agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and (principally) the Federal Election Commission, the authors show how a narrow view on campaign finance makes change difficult and why reforms often have limited success. By examining the fundamentals, Dwyre and Kolodny show the difficulties of changing a political system whose candidates have always relied on private funding of campaigns to one that guarantees free speech rights while minimizing concerns of corruption.
Recent elections around the world have seen young voters come out in large numbers to support young leaders running for office, such as New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern in October 2020. At the same time, ...however, young voters have shown strong support for relatively older candidates such as Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom and Bernie Sanders in the United States. While the former is consistent with the descriptive representation literature, the latter is not. This article deploys an experimental design involving 1000 young participants to analyse young voter support for older candidates. We find that young voters are significantly more likely to support older candidates if they are aware that these candidates champion general left-wing policies, but the same is not true for young candidates. We also find that ceteris paribus younger voters do not prefer younger candidates to older candidates.
This article estimates the electoral effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in three presidential elections in Brazil. It analyzes municipal-level electoral results and survey data and employs ...matching techniques to reduce causal inference problems typical of observational studies. Results show that CCTs are associated with increased performance by the incumbent party presidential candidate in all three elections but that these effects have been reaped by incumbents from different parties. It also shows that CCTs have had no discernible impacts on party identification and the performance of incumbent parties in legislative elections. Together, these findings suggest that CCTs are significant in the short run, but lack the capacity to induce substantial long-term voter realignments.
This article examines how House candidates used Twitter during the 2012 campaign. Using a content analysis of every tweet from each candidate for the House in the final two months before the 2012 ...election, this study provides a snapshot of House candidates’ “Twitter style.” In particular, this article shows that incumbents, Democrats, women, and those in competitive races tweet differently than challengers, Republicans, minor party candidates, men, and those in safe districts.
Much of what we know about the responses of voters to Black candidates and female candidates comes from experimental research. Yet the accuracy of experimental data can be threatened by the ...possibility that social desirability pressures contaminate self-reporting. We address this threat in a project that considers psychological approaches to reducing social desirability pressures. Offering participants the opportunity to explain their decisions about sensitive subjects, such as voting for a Black or female candidate, can lessen social desirability pressures. We analyze this approach across three commonly used samples: undergraduate, adult convenience, and adult national. Our results suggest that existing experimental research overestimates voter support for Black and female candidates, but these issues can be mitigated with the simple innovation presented here.
Current scholarship analyzes how gender influences the character-based traits and belief-based traits that women candidates are attributed. Yet little is known about the effect of the intersection of ...candidate sex and ethnicity on stereotyping. Thus, I explore whether candidate stereotyping functions similarly for Latina candidates as it does for white women. I also test if the race or ethnicity of the voter plays any role in how Latina women candidates are stereotyped. Given that we know that race/ethnicity matter for voters, particularly voters of color, I assess what occurs when candidate sex is also included. With the use of original survey data and through the use of difference of means tests I analyze how a Latina candidate compares with three other candidate types on feminine, masculine, and belief-based traits. I also compare how stereotyping varies based on the race and ethnicity of the voter. On the one hand my results are mixed regarding how Latina candidates are stereotyped, while on the other I do find that Latina/o respondents assess Latina candidates in a more favorable manner relative to white respondents.
Elections involving women candidates in the United States can offer unsettling examples of voter gender stereotypes, but research on women candidates provides little in the way of available data that ...allow us to link stereotypes to voter decision-making. This project reports results from a 2010 survey designed to examine gender stereotypes, candidate evaluations, and voting behavior in U.S. House elections with women candidates running against men. In general, stereotypes are not a central part of candidate evaluations or voting decisions, but the political party of the woman candidate can shape their role in candidate evaluations and vote choice.
The 2016 presidential campaign featured major-party candidates who both explicitly put issues of race and gender at the forefront of the discourse. Notably, 2016 also witnessed the largest gap ...between the presidential vote preferences of college-educated and non-college-educated whites since 1980. While Donald Trump enjoyed just a four-point margin over Hillary Clinton among whites with a college degree (10 points less than Mitt Romney's margin over Barack Obama among that group in 2012), his advantage among non-college-educated whites was nearly 40 points. This gap between college- and noncollege educated whites was possibly the single most uniquely important divide documented in 2016.
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