The role of candidates' personality in elections: evidence from a varying conjoint experiment

Autor principal:
Alberto Lopez Ortega (VU Amsterdam)
Autores:
Johannes Besch (University of Zurich)
Programa:
Sesión 5, Sesión 5
Día: jueves, 11 de julio de 2019
Hora: 11:00 a 12:45
Lugar: Aula 106

Scholars of personalization of politics claim that candidates and leaders evaluations are nowadays an essential part of voters’ electoral decisions. One of the alleged implications in that these decisions might be increasingly driven by the personal appeal of these individuals at the expense of the rather rational political reasoning. This study tackles this issue by assessing whether voters’ use candidates’ personalities to infer political information or whether, and if so, which, candidates’ personality play an independent role. The research design relies on a varying-conjoint experiment embedded in an original survey with 1,200 Spanish citizens. The results show that, although candidates’ personality is used as a cue for political means in low-information conditions, personality similarity might be one of the main drivers of the electoral decision. This suggests that, in personalized contexts, voters’ decisions may not only be political, and thus, elections may result at least partly in personality contests

Palabras clave: candidates evaluation, personality, informational shortcuts, heuristics, conjoint experiment