Personality Politics?: The Role of Leader Evaluations in Democratic Elections

Personality Politics?: The Role of Leader Evaluations in Democratic Elections1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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Acknowledgements
Marina Costa Lobo would like to acknowledge that this publication was financed by the project, ‘A Personalização da Política no Século XXI— Um Projecto de Pesquisa sobre Eleições Democráticas’—PTDC/CPJ- CPO/120295/2010 of the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT). In addition, the authors would like to thank the ECPR (European Consortium of Political Research) and the Portuguese Political Science Association, as well as Frederico Ferreira da Silva’s research assistance.
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Contents
List of Figures ix List of Tables xi List of Contributors xv
Introduction 1 Marina Costa Lobo and John Curtice
Section 1. Political or Not? Where Do Leader Evaluations Come From?
1. Leader Evaluations and Partisan Stereotypes—A Comparative Analysis 17 Amanda Bittner
2. What Comes First, Character Traits or Political Assessments? An Experimental Study 38 Sascha Huber
Section 2. Systematic or Not? When Do Leader Evaluations Matter?
3. The Impact of Leaders in Parliamentary and Presidential Regimes 63 John Curtice and Marco Lisi
4. Personality Politics in Single-Party and Coalition Governments 87 Solidea Formichelli
5. Leader Effects and Party Polarization 105 Romain Lachat
Section 3. Sophisticates or Uninformed Electors? Who Takes Leader Evaluations into Account?
6. Political Sophistication and Media Consumption as Factors of Personalization 127 Guillem Rico
Contents
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7. Party Dealignment and Leader Effects 148 Marina Costa Lobo
Section 4. Competence or Character? What about Leaders Matters?
8. Between Leadership and Charisma, the Importance of Leaders 169 Michael Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau
9. Determining the Components of Leader Effects in a Post-Communist Context 191 Andrei Gheorghi
10. Emotions Towards Leaders and Voting Behaviour 215 Tatjana Rudi
Conclusion 241 Marina Costa Lobo and John Curtice
Index 249
Figure 1.1. Summary Statistics: Evaluations of Three Main Party Leaders’ Competence and Character 23
Figure 1.2. Evaluations of Leaders’ Character and Competence: Comparing Leaders of Three Main Parties to Average of All Leaders 26
Figure 1.3. Summary Statistics: Evaluation of Leaders of Three Main Parties’ Character and Competence, by Level of Political Sophistication 31
Figure 2.1. Inferring Character Traits from the Political Issue Positions of Candidates 47
Figure 2.2. Inferring the Political Issue Positions of Candidates from Character Traits 48
Figure 2.3. Percentages of Overall Judgements about Candidates in the Various Conditions 49
Figure 3.1. Marginal Effects of Party, Leader Evaluations, and Ideological Distance on Vote Choice for Presidential and Parliamentary Elections 72
Figure 4.1. Leader’s Evaluation and Coalition Government Effect on Probability to Vote 98
Figure 5.1. Propensity to Support the SP, by Ideological Distance and Level of Political Sophistication 114
Figure 5.2. Propensity to Support the SP, by Sympathy for the Party Leader and Level of Political Sophistication 114
Figure 5.3. Effect of Party System Fragmentation on the Strength of Ideological Voting (Model 1) and Leader Voting (Model 3) 117
Figure 5.4. Effect of Electoral System Disproportionality on the Strength of Ideological Voting (Model 2) and Leader Voting (Model 4) 118
Figure 6.1. Predicted Effects of Leader Evaluations on Vote Choice, by Measures of Political Knowledge 137
Figure 6.2. Predicted Effects of Trait Perceptions on Leader Evaluations, by Measures of Political Knowledge 139
Figure 6.3. Predicted Effects of Leader Evaluations on Vote Choice, by Measures of Media Exposure 140
List of Figures
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Figure 6.4. Predicted Effects of Trait Perceptions on Leader Evaluations, by Measures of Media Exposure 142
Figure 7.1. An Index of Dealignment in Italy, Portugal, and Spain 156
Figure 7.2. Predicted Probabilities of Voting for the Incumbent Party by Strength of Party Identification (a Fully Comprehensive Model) 159
Figure 7.3. Predicted Probabilities of Voting for the Incumbent Party by Time of Voting Decision (a Fully Comprehensive Model) 160
Figure 7.4. Predicted Probabilities of Voting for the Incumbent Party by Type of Voter (a Fully Comprehensive Model) 161
Figure 7.5. Predicted Probabilities of Voting for the Incumbent by Dealignment (a Fully Comprehensive Model) 162
Figure 9.1. Defining Expectations Regarding the Personalization of Voting Decisions in Romania 198
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List of Tables
Table 1.1. Effects of Party Label on Evaluation of Leader’s Traits 24
Table 1.2. Difference in Means on Evaluations of Most Frequently Asked Traits 25
Table 1.3. Effects of Voters’ Partisanship and Leaders’ Party on Evaluations of Personality Traits 28
Table 1.4. Effects of Voters’ Partisanship and Leaders’ Party on Trait Evaluations, by Level of Political Sophistication 32
Table 2.1. Candidate Description in the Various Experimental Conditions 44
Table 2.2. The Influence of the Assessment of Political Positions on Character Evaluation 51
Table 2.3. The Influence of Character Evaluations on the Political Assessment of Candidates: Perceived Issue-distance 52
Table 2.4. The Influence of Candidate Character on Voting Behaviour in Different Contexts 53
Table 3.1. The Role of Leader and Party Evaluations in Presidential and Parliamentary Elections 70
Table 3.2. The Role of Leader and Party Evaluations in Different Types of Parliamentary Elections 74
Table 3.3. Parliamentary Elections in Presidential and Parliamentary Systems 75
Table 3.4. Party System and Larger Parties 77
Table 3.5. How the Role of Leadership Evaluations Varies by Type of Electorate 79
Appendix A: Elections Analysed 85
Appendix B: Coding of Variables 86
Table 4.1. Data Sources 92
Table 4.2. Parameter Estimates for the Full Multi-level Model of Socialist and Conservative Vote 96
Table A4.1. National Parties and Leaders of the Socialist Party Family 102
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Table A4.2. National Parties and Leaders of the Christian Democratic Party Family 103
Table 5.1. Impact of Left-Right Ideology and Leader Evaluations on the Electoral Utilities, National Level 113
Table 5.2. Effect of Electoral Competitiveness on Ideological Voting 116
Table 5.3. Effect of Electoral Competitiveness on Leader Voting 117
Table A5.1. Descriptive Statistics, Individual-level Variables 123
Table A5.2. Descriptive Statistics, Contextual-level Variables 123
Table 6.1. Homogenous Models: Leader Effects and Trait Perception Effects 135
Table 6.2. Political Sophistication and Leader Effects on Vote Choice 136
Table 6.3. Political Sophistication and Trait Perception Effects on Leader Evaluations 138
Table 6.4. Media Exposure and Leader Effects on Vote Choice 139
Table 6.5. Media Exposure and Trait Perception Effects on Leader Evaluations 141
Table 7.1. The Dealigned vs. the Aligned in Italy, Portugal, and Spain 154
Table 7.2 Correlations between Strength of Party ID, Swing Voters, and Late Deciders 155
Table 7.3. The Importance of Leader Effects in Different Types of Electorate (a Simple Model) 157
Table 7.4. The Importance of Leader Effects in Different Types of Electorate (a Comprehensive Model) 158
Table 7.5. The Relationship between Dealignment and Political Knowledge 163
Table 8.1. Correlation of Feeling Thermometers and Leadership Images in Four French Presidential Elections (2007, 2002, 1995, 1988) 172
Table 8.2. Leader Effects in Four French Presidential Elections (Binomial Logits, Full Specification; 2007, 2002, 1995, 1988) 176
Table 8.3. Changes in Probabilities: Impact of Feeling Thermometers on the Vote in Four French Presidential Elections (Second Round; 2007, 2002, 1995, 1988) 181
Table 8.4. Feeling Thermometer Determinants in Four French Presidential Elections (OLS Models, Full Specification; 2007, 2002, 1995, 1988) 182
Table 8.5. Jean-Marie Le Pen: Leader Effect and Feeling Thermometer Determinants in Four French Presidential Elections (1988, 1995, 2002, 2007) 184
Table 9.1. Explanatory Models of Voter Evaluation for the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the ‘Justice and Truth’ PNL-PD Alliance (ADA). Standardized Beta Coefficients with Standard Errors, OLS Regression 202
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Table 9.2. Explanatory Models of Vote Intention for the National Union PSD+PUR and the ‘Justice and Truth’ PNL-PD Alliance (ADA). B Coefficients with Standard Errors, exp(b), Binary Logit Regression 203
Table 9.3. Determinants of Popularity Scores for Adrian Nastase [Refer to the spelling on p. 207] (PSD+PUR) and Traian Basescu [Refer to the spelling on p. 207] (ADA) 207
Appendix: Explanatory Variables Controlled For in the Regression Models 213
Table 10.1. Directional Effects of Emotional Reactions to Leaders on Vote Choices 226
Table 10.2. Directional Effects of Emotional Reactions to Leaders on the Probability of Voting for Different Vote Choices 227
Table 10.3. Mediating Effects of Anxiety on Vote Choices (Anxious Citizens) 230
Table 10.4. Mediating Effects of Anxiety on Vote Choices (Non-Anxious Citizens) 230
Table A10.1. Directional Effects of Aversion on Vote Choices (Without Enthusiasm and Anxiety) 238
Table A10.2. Directional Effects of Anxiety on Vote Choices (Without Enthusiasm and Aversion) 239
Table A10.3. Directional Effects of Emotional Reactions to Leaders on Vote Choices (Without Party Evaluations) 240
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List of Contributors
Amanda Bittner is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Memorial University, Canada. She is the author of Platform or Personality? The Role of Party Leaders in Elections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Marina Costa Lobo is a Political Science Researcher at the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Lisbon. Her research has focused on leader effects in new democracies. She has been co-director of the Portuguese Election Study since 2001. Recent publications include Portugal at the Polls (with A. Freire and P. Magalhães) and academic articles in Political Research Quarterly, European Journal of Political Research, Electoral Studies, and Party Politics.
John Curtice is Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He was co-director of the British Election Study from 1983 to 1997, is a former member of the steering committee of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Project, and has been a co-editor of the British Social Attitudes series since 1994. Other publications include The Rise of New Labour (with A. Heath and R. Jowell, 2001) and Has Devolution Delivered? (edited with C. Bromley, D. McCrone, and A. Park, 2001).
Solidea Formichelli holds a PhD on leader effects in Europe from the University of Siena, Italy.
Andrei Gheorghi is Professor of Sociology at Sibiciu University, Romania.
Sascha Huber is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Mannheim, Germany. He has published several articles on leader effects. His latest publication is Faas, Thorsten, and Huber (2010) ‘Experimente in der Politikwissenschaft: Vom Mauerblümchen zum Mainstream’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 51: 721–49.
Romain Lachat is Visiting Professor at the Political and Social Sciences Department of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. His publications include Romain Lachat and Peter Selb (2010). ‘Strategic Overshooting in National Council Elections’, Swiss Political Science Review 16(3): 481–498; and Peter Selb and Romain Lachat (2009). ‘The More, the Better? Counterfactual Evidence
List of Contributors
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on the Effect of Compulsory Voting on the Consistency of Party Choice’, European Journal of Political Research 48(5): 573–597.
Michael Lewis-Beck is Professor Emeritus F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa, United States. Professor Lewis-Beck is one of today’s most important political scientists. Some of his most relevant publications include The American Voter Revisited (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (with W. Jacoby, H. Norpoth, and H. Weisberg), 2008); Economics & Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988); Forecasting Elections (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly Press (with T. Rice), 1992); and Applied Regression: An Introduction (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980).
Marco Lisi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Studies, Nova University of Lisbon. He is the author of several books and articles on political parties, and electoral behavior and he recently co-edited Transformations of the Radical Left in Southern Europe (London: Routledge, 2014).
Richard Nadeau is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Montreal, Canada. He has published widely on electoral behaviour. His most important publications include Elisabeth Gidengil, André Blais, Neil Nevitte, and Richard Nadeau (2004). Citizens (Vancouver: UBC Press); André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, Richard Nadeau, and Neil Nevitte (2002). Anatomy of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the Vote in the 2000 Canadian Election (Peterborough: Broadview Press); and Neil Nevitte, André Blais, Elisabeth Gidengil, and Richard Nadeau (2000). Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election (Don Mills, Canada: Oxford University Press).
Guillem Rico holds a PhD in Political Science from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. His recent publications include Guillem Rico (2009), Líderes políticos, opinión pública y comportamiento electoral en España (Madrid: CIS).
Tatjana Rudi holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Mainz, Germany. She is currently one of the researchers responsible for the German Longitudinal Election Study Team at GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences.
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Introduction
Marina Costa Lobo and John Curtice
Whenever elections are fought, it is often the case that the media attribute to leaders and leadership a key role in the outcome. Be it in presidential elections in the United States or a parliamentary election in Britain, journalists and pundits alike debate at considerable length the relative merits of different candidates, their personal characteristics, and the importance of the TV debates for clinching the election. Yet, the ubiquity of leaders in the public discourse on politics and elections contrasts considerably with the role that has been attributed to leaders in the field of political behaviour, and political science more generally. To a significant extent, the study of democracy, be it from the perspective of institutions or individuals, has been implicitly about the study of how to constrain abuses of power, as well as excessive concentra- tion of power in the hands of one leader (Ruscio 2008). As a result, the role of leaders has not been at the centre of political studies. In the electoral studies literature, it is often assumed that electors’ behaviour should depend mainly on their political outlook, and/or that they concern themselves exclusively with social identities and political issues, rather than on leaders as cues for voting, presumably because social anchors and issues are seen as political cues, whereas leaders are not. Yet, a long standing tradition of the study of leadership in political studies does exist, ranging from Weber’s definition of charismatic leadership to Burns’ distinction between transactional vs. trans- formational leadership (Weber 1968; Burns 1978).
More recently, the study of leaders’ impact has been growing, as well as the debate on the importance which they have in European democracies. Studies of the relationship between leaders, their parties, and political institutions have argued that European democracies have become increasingly personlized, that is, that irrespective of the formal constitutional position, party leaders rather than political parties are now the decisive actors in the political system. Inter alia, this has been documented through the increasing personalization of political campaigns, the growing control of political parties exercised by
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leaders, and the increased power of prime ministers within governments (Poguntke and Webb 2005; McAllister 2007; Karvonen 2010).
Authors who stress that the presidentialization of politics is happening argue that this phenomenon is a corollary of several factors. First, moderniza- tion and the consequent individualization of society have led to a loosening of social structures that used to bind individuals to a preordained set of social and political attitudes and behaviours. The increasing patterns of social fluid- ity mean that parties find it difficult to perform a linkage function between electors and institutions. In such a context, it is sometimes argued that voters have become dealigned with voting choices based on issues and leaders rather than relying on party as heuristics (Dalton, Wattenberg, and McAllister 2000). Accordingly, this decline in structures and long-term forces that shape electors’ loyalties to political parties has had a large impact in raising the importance of leaders both for party organization and for the way elections are fought.
Secondly, the continuous and growing mediatization of the political process, which is especially pronounced during the campaign periods, has been established (Swanson and Mancini 1996). This trend is seen as a factor in the rising importance of leaders in elections, namely, an emphasis on the candidate, and their personal campaign organization, and is happening both in the United States and across Europe (Farrell 2006, 123). The widespread use of televised debates among the main party candidates has arguably contributed to the centrality of leaders during campaigns (LeDuc, Niemi, and Norris 1996; Garzia 2011).
Thirdly, the overall downsizing of the state since the late 1980s, and glo- balization, has paradoxically led to a more central and visible role for leaders, as they act as states’ representatives across the globe in international forums (Poguntke and Webb 2005, 16).
Fourthly, internal party change has furthered personalized politics. Parties have responded to exogenous pressures for more visibility to candidates with reforms that further reinforce the role of leaders, for example, the introduction of direct election of leaders (Cross and Blais 2012). Nonetheless, the evidence which has been gathered on the importance of leaders in the field of electoral behaviour has been less consensual, as we will present here.
If leader effects are found to matter, how should we interpret this development for the future of democracy? The answer to that question hinges on the nature of leader effects per se, as well as the degree to which the electorate is sophisticated. If we find that leader effects are a proxy for party identification, then by and large, attachment to a leader reflects prior party identification. It is simply party identification by other means, in an age of TV democracy. Liking a leader is a reflection of the electors’ perceptions of that leader’s political views, their political choices, and their competence for
Introduction
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office. Proper research which carefully models for endogeneity and considers multicausality should make it possible to measure the degree to which leader effects are in effect explained by prior party identification.
Using the leader as a cue for voting may not be a negative development for democracy, even if we consider a dealigned electorate. Provided the electorate is sophisticated, this could even be welcomed as a positive change. An informed electorate will seek information on leaders’ political views and policy preferences before making a choice. Such a change would thus be representative of a new relationship between the electorate and politicians, whereby the latter are much more closely monitored. They cannot expect the electorate’s loyal vote one election after the next, simply because they stand for a given party. It is a model of voting which approximates the rational choice model (Dalton and Klingemann 2007, 11).
On the other hand, of course, if it is found that leader effects are contin- gent on media displays of the candidates, that is, the extent to which they appear on television, the way they look, and their personal characteristics, then it is likely that leader effects are a worrying sign of negative changes in the nature of democracy. In such a context, the rise of leader effects would have to be seen as a sign of a depoliticization of elections, which would cease being about issues and political choices, and instead become a ‘beauty contest’ between politicians. Naturally, if the electorate using leader effects has very little information on political issues, the likelihood that leaders are being used as proxies for political issues declines, and the chances that they are being chosen for their looks and charm on television increases.
What We Know So Far
We start from the premise that, as has been amply shown elsewhere, how people vote is decreasingly determined by their location in the social structure (such as their social class or religious membership) or by a long-term sense of loyalty to a political party (Dalton et al. 2000; Dalton 2002; Thomassen 2005). Whereas in the 1960s social cleavages explained 30% of the variance in electoral choice, in the mid-1980s that value had declined to 10%. Recent studies (Franklin 2009; 2010) find the set of Western countries to have ended the twentieth century with variance in party choice explained by social structure in single digits (in the United States, the corresponding variance explained reaches 12% only).
Correspondingly, short-term factors, such as issue positions (Borre 2001; Knutsen and Kumlin 2005) and evaluations of the economy (Kiewiet and Rivers 1984; Lewis-Beck and Paldam 2000), have become more important.
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As part of this process, evaluations of party leaders have supposedly become more important too.
There has been no consensus in attempts to measure the impact of leaders. Some authors contend that supposedly parliamentary elections are now effectively presidential contests (Clarke et al. 1979; Graetz and MacAllister 1987; Bean and Mughan 1989; Glaser and Salmon 1991; Stewart and Clarke 1992; Mughan 1995; Mughan 2000; Clarke et al. 2004). However, this claim is far from uncontested. Some studies cast doubt on whether evaluations of leaders have ever had much impact on either individual voters or election outcomes (Bartle 2002; Bartle and Crewe 2002, King 2002; for an overview, see Barisione 2009 and Karvonen 2010). The trend of presidentialization implies the growing importance of leaders, and thus can only be tested through a longitudinal analysis of voting behaviour. The few such studies that have actually empirically tested the claim that leader evaluations have become more important over time reach quite cautious conclusions (Curtice and Holmberg 2005; Brettschneider et al. 2006). Two recent additions to the literature have been published most recently. An edited volume by Aarts, Blais, and Schmitt, Political Leaders and Democratic Elections, uses election surveys over the past fifty years to understand the impact of political leaders on voting decisions in nine democracies (the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Australia). It covers topics such as the impact of the rise of TV politics, and investigates the relationship between institutional varia- tion and leader effects. Due to its longitudinal dataset, the authors are able to test the ‘presidentialization’ hypothesis and conclude that the characteristics of political leaders, parties, and indeed, voters themselves, are actually not important for voting patterns. These findings are contrary to those of another recent study by Bittner (2011), where the author—also using a longitudinal dataset with election studies between 1968 and 2006 in Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States—reaches the conclusion that leader effects matter. Using character traits as independent variables in the large pooled dataset, in a fully comprehensive model of voting behaviour, it is found that leaders are systematically a relevant factor for vote choice. Not only that, but leaders also have a relevant impact on party success and electoral outcomes. Thus, even with the more recent studies, the controversy over the presidentialization thesis has not been resolved.
Not least of the reasons for this dispute are the methodological challenges that surround any attempt to study leader effects, especially the issue of endogeneity (Andersen and Evans 2003; Clarke et al. 2004; Evans and Andersen 2005). Part of the reason for the disagreement on the magnitude of leader effects seems to stem from the differences in the way in which authors esti- mate leader effects, and how they attempt to isolate those from party identification, ideological effects, and other short-term factors. Meanwhile, if
Introduction
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party leaders have indeed become more influential in shaping the electoral appeal of their parties, attempts to ascertain their impact independently of the appeal of their parties might simply be misguided.
In any event, it is doubtful whether sweeping claims about the presidentialization of elections should be made without any regard to the political and social context within which elections take place. For example, most past research has focused on consolidated democracies, largely ignoring the expe- rience of younger democracies.1 However, partisanship is generally lower in newer democracies (van Biezen and Mair 2002). So, if short-term forces such as leader evaluations matter more where the electorate is less socially anchored or partisan, we might expect leaders to have a greater impact on voting behaviour in such democracies. Certainly, where the role of leader evaluations has been examined in studies of newer democracies, their impact emerges as not insubstantial (Gunther and Montero 2001; Lobo 2006; Rudi 2009).
Equally, even amongst consolidated democracies themselves, the impact of leader evaluations seems to vary according to the political context. At the macro level, leaders matter more in presidential and semi-presidential regimes than in parliamentary ones. In a parliamentary context, however, as might be expected, leadership evaluations appear to matter more where a majoritarian electoral system is in place, where the battle for power is focused on two parties (Curtice and Holmberg 2005; Curtice and Hunjan 2007), or on the type of parties which exist as catch-all vs. electoralist (Lobo 2008). Indeed, the political context may matter considerably for leader effects. In this area, there is still a lot of untested hypotheses, some of which are dealt with in this book, especially in what concerns the impact of coalition vs. single party governments on leader effects (Formichelli) and the relationship between degree of party system polarization and leader effects (Lachat).
At the micro level, there have been considerable advances in the field of political psychology researching the way in which electors make political choices, and the way that preferences on leaders are formed and influence voting decisions (Lau and Redlawsk 2006), whether candidates’ traits trump political platforms (Bittner 2011), and the extent to which emotion and reason are independent and influence political attitudes towards leaders (Redlawsk, Civettini, and Lau 2007). In electoral studies, there has been substantial research carried out on the link between media (and especially TV) exposure and leader effects, as well as on the link between political sophistication and the importance attributed to leaders. The advent of mass media
1 Even Aarts et al. (2011) is only a partial exception to this rule. It includes just one younger democracy, Spain, alongside the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Norway.
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communication has placed television at the centre of political campaigns. From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, beginning in the United States, television has led to a personalization of the parties’ images. Related to this hypothesis is one which connects degree of political sophistication and leader effects. However, there has yet been little consensus on the degree to which high levels of TV exposure or low levels of political sophistication magnify leader effects (Gidengil et al. 2000; Kroh 2004), although most studies point to relatively small effects.
On the issue of political sophistication, the initial hypothesis posited that those with little information on the issues at stake in a campaign would be more inclined to vote according to their sympathies towards a given candidate. However, recent research has begun to show that, on the contrary, it is those with most political knowledge that tend to be more sensitive to leader effects (Gidengil et al. 2000; Kroh 2004; Bittner 2011). An interesting hypothesis was put forward by Clarke et al. (2004, 174–176), which nonetheless could not be fully proven: that leader effects might follow a curvilinear pattern, with voters with moderate levels of political expertise experiencing the largest effect. Leader effects would be lowest for voters with low levels of expertise, since they are unhinged and no type of political cues would affect them. Effects would also be lower at the high end of voter sophistication, since these rely on other sources of information that require higher levels of expertise.
Our Goals
This book assesses the role that voters’ perceptions and evaluations of leaders play nowadays in democratic elections. We will present evidence from an array of countries with diverse historical and institutional contexts, and employ innovative methodologies, in order to assess the importance of leaders in democracies worldwide. Careful consideration of leader effects in different contexts will enable us to respond to a series of interconnected questions which have been left largely unanswered in the existing studies: Do leader effects make a relevant contribution to variance explained in a multicausal model of voting? Where do leaders effects come from? In which institutional contexts are leader effects more important? To which kinds of voters are leaders a more prominent factor for voting behaviour? And what do leader effects stand for? Taken together, we will be able to answer the fundamental question about leader effects in old and new democracies: namely, to what extent are they a sign of a new, more rational, relationship between the electorate and the political realm, or whether they symbolize the debasing of politics in the contestation of elections.
Introduction
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We therefore propose to analyse the impact of evaluations of European leaders on voting behaviour and election outcomes across different contexts, over time, and amongst different kinds of voters, paying attention to the younger democracies of Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, as well as consolidated industrial democracies. In so doing, we seek to move the goal- posts of debate on leader effects from the question of magnitude to the question of contexts. Ultimately, we will determine whether the role leaders play enhances or damages the electoral process, and so we will be able to contrib- ute to the debate on the quality of democracy in electoral democracies today.
The breadth of countries and periods being analysed in this book should be considered as one of its main strengths. Taking all the chapters together, leader effects in the following countries are analysed in a comparative perspective: Australia, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States. Individual chapters focus exclusively on one country, normally from a longitudinal perspective, namely, Croatia, France, and Switzerland. The period covered ranges from the 1980s until the first decade of the twenty-first century, thus covering circa three decades of electoral politics. In what follows, we describe each Section in the book and provide a brief account of each chapter’s goals.
Political or Not? Where do Leader Evaluations Come from?
In this Section, chapters will unpack the meaning of leader evaluations. Are leader evaluations a proxy for ideology or party identification? Or are they derived from other sources? Extant literature on the topic is scarce and often non-comparative. In the first chapter, Amanda Bittner analyses the origins of personality traits. The main goal is to answer the question of where do the perceptions on leaders actually come from? How are they formed?
Drawing on existing research on the US case, the author builds a hypothesis that links partisan stereotypes to personality traits. For the American voter, it has been determined that Democrats are perceived as more compassionate and empathetic, while Republicans are considered to be tougher and stronger leaders. If party labels are traditionally associated with certain personality traits, then we would expect these stereotypes to feed back into perceptions of political candidates. The main goal of the chapter is to apply this hypothesis in a comparative context. To that end, the author built a database including thirty-five election studies from seven countries spanning three decades (’80s, ’90s, ’00s), pooled together to look at the evaluations of leaders’ traits across a number of institutional environments. Thus, not only is the analysis
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across countries, but it is also across time, with several elections per country included. This gives the research both enormous breadth and depth. The chapter ends by testing whether partisan stereotypes are a cue primarily for less sophisticated voters.
The second chapter has a similar focus on the ‘origins’ of perceptions of leaders. Sascha Huber explores the interdependency of personal and political factors in explaining judgements on politicians. To assess the causality of factors, the author carried out an experimental study—considered ideal because it enables the manipulation of the information that is accessible to each sample group in order to determine which factors are causal, and preclude endogeneity. The experiments were conducted with two objectives: the first was to disentangle the relationship between political and apolitical factors in the formation of judgements on political leaders. In this part of the chapter, the questions asked are the following: First, do voters infer character traits from the political positions of leaders or vice versa? Second, do voters adjust their judgements about character traits to their political assessment of leaders or vice versa? Answering these questions allows for a better understand- ing of the thought processes which characterize electors’ views on policies. The second objective of the chapter is to analyse the institutional effects of parliamentary and presidential elections on the influence of character assessments on vote choices. To this end, three experiments were conducted with 286 subjects in Germany, 313 subjects in France, and 347 subjects in Sweden. Sascha Huber takes us through the experiments, where specific types of information are given or withheld to groups of respondents before they are asked to make a character judgement, or simulate a vote choice. Such innovative methodology allows for strong causal inferences on the meaning of perceptions of leaders.
Systematic or Not? When do Leader Evaluations Matter?
In this Section, the relationship between leader evaluations and the institutional setting in which they occur is examined. It has been shown that leadership evaluations matter more where a majoritarian electoral system is in place or where the battle for power is focused on two parties (Curtice and Holmberg 2005). However, other institutional variables may be included which may be considered relevant mediators of leader effects. Candidates for inclusion as macro variables include: political institutions, electoral rules, and party systems; age of democracy; single and coalition government; and party polarization.
In chapter 3 John Curtice and Marco Lisi investigate how institutional designs shape the impact of leaders on party choice. Using the CSES dataset, it includes thirty-seven election studies held in twenty-nine countries. The first and most important proposition that they test is whether leadership
Introduction
9
evaluations now have just as much influence on the way that people vote in parliamentary elections as they do in presidential ones. Next, the authors test the sub-hypothesis that in certain types of parliamentary elections—namely, those using a majoritarian electoral system or those where a two-party system exists—leaders will matter as much as in presidential elections. They further distinguish between parliamentary elections held in parliamentary systems and those held in semi-presidential regimes. In the last section of the chapter, the authors test the relationship between the strength of party identification and leader effects.
In the next chapter Solidea Formichelli investigates the importance of party system format for the strength of leader effects, across eighteen European Member States, in a period of time that ranges from 1990 to 2006. Two interrelated hypotheses are tested, namely, that moving from a two-party system to a multiparty system, the leaders’ impact on voting behaviour will increase, and that moving from a one-party to a coalition government, a similar impact occurs. The analysis proceeds in the following way: first, a model is built to compare the explanatory power of an exclusively sociopolitical model of voting behaviour with one where the leaders’ impact on voting behaviour is added to the model to determine the significance of leader effects in the model. Then, the previous analysis is rerun, this time, controlling for the effects of the party system. This chapter breaks new ground, not only due to the theoretical question which is asked, often assumed but never tested thoroughly, and also due to the size of the database which was constructed, which is also thoroughly representative of the European voter.
Roman Lachat’s chapter focuses on the 2007 Swiss parliamentary elections and researches the effects of ideology and leader effects on voting propensities, controlling by political sophistication and electoral competitiveness. At the micro level he test the hypotheses that the importance of ideology should vary negatively with the importance of leaders on voting propensities and that political sophistication should vary positively with the impact of ideological distances. At the macro level, Lachat expects competitiveness to vary negatively with leader effects.
Sophisticated or Uninformed Electors? Who Takes Leader Evaluations into Account?
This Section of the book addresses the issue of which voters are more prone to use leaders in their vote calculus. There is good reason too to anticipate that evaluations of leaders affect the behaviour of some voters more than others. Past research has suggested that candidates may matter more for voters with low levels of political sophistication (Gidengil et al. 2000; Bartle 2002). Using a variety of country cases and innovative methodologies, the chapters in this
10
Section analyse the profile of voters who are influenced by leaders, namely, in terms of political sophistication, type of media exposure, and degree of party identification.
Guillem Rico’s chapter seeks to understand the relationship between degree of political sophistication and media exposure on the one hand, and leader evaluations and party choice on the other hand. Those who have relatively little political sophistication would be expected to rely more on trait characteristics for their judgement on leaders, rather than sophisticates, who would rely more on party cues or other political factors both for party and vote choice. Similarly, the less sophisticated would be expected to use leaders as a cue for voting to a greater extent. The analysis is longitudinal, using individual data from four Spanish general elections between 1982 and 2008, thus allowing the author not only to test the importance of individual characteristics on the components of leader evaluations and vote choice, but also to test whether these effects have increased over time.
The next chapter, by Marina Costa Lobo, investigates the importance of leader effects for the dealigned electorate. The goal of the chapter is to test whether those who have no party identification, individuals who decided who to vote for during the campaign, and also those who switch party vote from one election to the next, tend to give more importance to leaders. The assumption is that leaders will be more important for electors with only a weak relation to parties. The data used to test these interrelated hypotheses are gathered from recent election studies in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, countries chosen due to their differences in the aggregate level of dealignment: Italy is a case of modest dealignment, Spain is an intermediate case, and Portugal is a democracy wherein a large percentage of the electorate is dealigned.
Competence or Character? What about Leaders Matters?
The fourth and final Section of the book explores the dimensions of affect for leaders. Are leader effects synonymous with personality traits or are they a heuristic device for prime ministerial performance abilities? Do they epito- mize the debasing of politics, the end of the importance of issues, and the transformation of politics into ‘beauty contests’? Previous studies have not been completely decisive on these issues. We will seek to present evidence using diverse methodological techniques and different countries which illu- minate this aspect of the importance of leaders.
Michael Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau investigate leader effects in the French presidential elections between 1988 and 2007. As the authors note, the importance of the presidential figure in France ‘stands as a given’, but has seldom been systematically addressed. The French case has been very rarely included in edited volumes on leader effects. In this chapter, the
Introduction
11
authors start by assessing the magnitude of leader effects across the three decades of presidential voting, in the first- and second-round of the presidential contest, for the mainstream parties of French politics. The particu- larities of this two-round election system, with only the two most voted candidates in the second-round, justify the analysis: it is expected that leaders’ effects increase from the first- to the second-round. Next, Lewis-Beck and Nadeau use the leader thermometers as dependent variables in order to establish what explanatory factors lay behind these attitudes towards leaders. Are these mostly proxies for ideology or issue positioning, or do character traits actually bear on the importance of leaders? The last section of the chapter deals with Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right wing Front National party, who reached the second-round of presidential elections in 2002. The leader effects for the Le Pen voters are presented as a test of whether these effects are stronger in this type of party.
Gheorghi analyses leader effects in Romania across two decades. In Central and Eastern Europe, party systems tend to be weakly anchored in society, and leaders have traditionally assumed a prominent role in politics. There are lower levels of political involvement, weak party identification, and high electoral volatility. Together, these factors constitute favourable ter- rain for the personalization of politics. The data employed are of two types: the Public Opinion Barometers which measure vote intention for legislative and presidential elections, declared confidence in the political leaders, and several sociodemographical variables; and a pre- and post-election panel carried out during the 2004 legislative elections. The analysis is conducted first from a longitudinal perspective using the Barometer data, testing the association between leaders, political events, and voting intention. For the 2004 survey data, a model was built in order to measure the magnitude of leader effects. In the last part of the chapter, Gheorghi employs a strategy very similar to the one adopted by Nadeau and Lewis-Beck in order to understand the importance of candidate traits vis-à-vis other factors in the leader scales. These models are rerun, distinguishing between electors’ political knowledge.
The last chapter in the volume is an investigation of the role of emotions in leadership effects. Tatjana Rudi starts from the premise, similar to the one Gheorghi presents, that in Central and Eastern European democracies, due to the relatively unanchored nature of the electorate, leaders matter quite substantially for vote choices. Her research distinguishes between the affective vs. cognitive nature of perceptions of leaders, with the author expecting a combination of those types of factors to explain the leader thermometers. The chapter proposes to test several hypotheses. At a basic level, it seeks to test the importance of emotions about leaders for vote choice. The enthusiasm scale is expected to be more important as a predictor for parties which are well known to the electorate, that is, the government
12
and main opposition parties. Conversely, the anxiety scale should be more relevant for parties whose leaders are relatively unknown. A vote model is constructed in order to determine the importance of these emotions, controlling for other intervening variables, namely, sociodemographic factors and ideology.
In the Conclusion, we will provide a systematic overview of the book’s findings. As will be demonstrated, we will be able to draw significant conclusions on the specificities of leader effects, both in terms of whether its nature and origins are mostly personal or political, and in which contexts they matter more, both in consolidated and newer democracies. A whole section is devoted to the issue of the types of electorate (viewed from the perspective of media exposure, political sophistication, and party dealignment) which are more liable to use leader perceptions as cues. This is a major concern that cross-cuts several chapters of other Sections. Ultimately, it will also serve as a crucial test to understand the significance of leaders for the quality of democracies in the twenty-first century.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the persons and institutions which have, in one way or another, supported our efforts. We wish to thank the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, as well as the University of Strathclyde, for financially supporting the project.
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Section 1 Political or Not? Where Do Leader Evaluations Come From?
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1
Amanda Bittner
1.1 Introduction
Both campaign organizers and the media appear to agree that voters’ perceptions of party leaders have an important impact on the vote: substantial effort is made to ensure that leaders look good, that they speak well, and that they are up in the polls. Media reports during election campaigns focus on the horse race and how leaders are perceived in the public eye. In contrast, the academic literature is much more divided. Some suggest that leaders play an important role in the vote calculus, while others argue that in comparison to other factors (such as partisanship and the economy), perceptions of leaders have only a minimal effect.
There is also substantial disagreement about how it is that voters actually evaluate candidates in the first place. Scholars have reached very different conclusions about the types of factors that influence voters’ evaluations of leaders. Existing studies point to divergent sets of factors, including voter demographics (Cutler 2002), partisanship and ideology (Bartels 2002; Graetz and McAllister 1987), and policy/issue related factors (Rusk and Weisberg 1972; Weisberg and Rusk 1970).
In addition to these ‘background’ factors, some scholars have noted that the party label itself provides cues to voters when they lack information, and that even when other types of information are available, voters continue to rely upon a ‘partisan stereotype’ in inferring candidates’ issue positions. Recent US research (Goren 2007; Hayes 2005) suggests that the impact of the partisan stereotype extends beyond issue positions to impressions of candidates’ personality traits as well. Individuals’ characteristics are judged in the light of a partisan stereotype, as Democrats are perceived to be more compassionate
Amanda Bittner
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and empathetic, while Republicans are considered to be tougher and stronger leaders. While these findings are specific to the United States, it is reasonable to expect that the existence and reliance upon a partisan stereotype extends to candidate evaluation beyond US borders.
In order to determine the potential cross-national effects of a partisan stereotype, comparative analysis is required. This chapter thus incorporates data from thirty-five election studies across seven countries with varying institutional environments: Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States. By pooling these data and examining the impact of leaders on a larger (comparative) basis, this study takes both a broad and in-depth look at evaluations of party leaders.
Both cognitive psychology and economics have influenced political science understandings of how voters cope with both cognitive limits and the necessities of efficiency to make reasoned decisions. Some suggest that because of their limited capabilities in dealing with information, people use information that is already stored to arrive at their decisions. Many scholars suggest that individuals are able to make use of information shortcuts, or heuristics, to come to reasoned decisions (Brady and Sniderman 1985; Lau and Redlawsk 1997).
Among the many heuristics that individuals may use (see Lau 2003 for a detailed description of different types of heuristics), two are particularly per- tinent in the evaluation of party leaders. First is the application of partisan and ideological schemata—in which individuals categorize candidates with whom they are relatively unfamiliar according to categories that already exist in their minds. Effectively, individuals assume that new information is consistent with existing information, and they apply a ‘category-based affect’, deciding how they feel about the individual candidate based on how they feel about the category as a whole (Lau 2003). Second, individuals may also apply person stereotypes, in which factors such as age, gender, race, and the way that a person looks will inform an individual’s impression of candidates. Thus, ‘since women are traditionally seen as more compassionate than men, women candidates are often seen to be more competent on, or more con- cerned with, compassion issues such as helping the poor or advocating for children’ (McDermott 1998).
Rahn suggests that ‘our notions about what groups are like strongly influence how we appraise individual members of these groups’ (1993), and that ‘in partisan elections, the most powerful cue provided by the political environment is the candidate’s membership in a particular political party. Even if voters know nothing else about a candidate, the ballot provides them with one important piece of information’ (1993). The party label, therefore, provides information to voters that will assist in the decision-making process. This ‘partisan stereotype’ is different from the effect of a voter’s own partisanship,
Leader Evaluations and Partisan Stereotypes
19
which may also influence his or her perceptions of a candidate. Conover and Feldman (1989) note that voters will rely upon their own partisanship to make inferences about candidates’ positions, for example. According to their research, this projection effect occurs in extremely low information settings: due to a lack of ‘real’ information, voters will project their own issue positions (and/or partisanship) onto their preferred candidate.
The effect of the partisan stereotype is different from a projection effect, in that the label of the candidate provides information to the voter, information that the voter then uses to ascribe issue positions to that candidate. Thus, the idea is that in low-information settings, that is, where voters lack the information that would allow them to wade through competing candidates’ issue positions and platforms in order to decide who to vote for, they will rely upon readily available cues (including the party label of the candidate) in order to be able to assign issue positions and make decisions (Conover and Feldman 1989; Kinder 1978; McDermott 1997, 1998, 2005; Rahn 1993). Rahn suggests that the use of partisan stereotypes may be a fairly reliable way to ‘simplify the political environment’ (1993) because parties differ in what are largely predictable ways.
Hayes notes that party leaders are perceived to have strengths in certain personality traits in the American context (Hayes 2005), and puts forth a theory of ‘trait ownership’, much like theories of ‘issue ownership’ that have emerged in voting behaviour literature both inside and outside the United States (Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996; Petrocik et al. 2003; Rabinowitz and MacDonald 1989). The idea is that certain executive characteristics have policy content, and as much as parties tend to ‘own’ issues, their party leaders tend to ‘own’ related traits. Petrocik (1996) describes the division of issue ownership in the United States:
Democrats are seen as better able to handle welfare problems. Perceptions of the parties on social issues (e.g. crime and protecting moral values) favor the GOP. The data also document the GOP’s hold on foreign policy and defense through the late 1980s. Opinions were mixed on economic matters, but were generally a GOP asset (by an average of about 13 points). Government spending, inflation, and taxation were also Republican issues (Petrocik 1996, 831).
Because parties have an advantage in their issue areas, candidates will emphasize their party’s issues (Petrocik 1996; Petrocik et al. 2003; Sides 2006; Simon 2002), and because of the heavy focus on leaders in the media (Gidengil and Everitt 2000; Mendelsohn 1993, 1994, 1996), issue ownership is translated into the ownership of related personality traits. Unless shown otherwise, ‘voters will usually assume that a Democratic candidate is more liberal than conservative, that he/she favours social programs over defence programs, while Republicans are, for the most part, defence ‘hawks’ who
Amanda Bittner
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support lower taxes and smaller government’ (McDermott 1998). Brought to the level of specific personality traits, ‘Republicans appear to own leadership and morality, while Democrats own compassion and empathy’ (Hayes 2005).
Based on theories of issue ownership, generally speaking (not solely in the American context), right-of-centre parties ought to be seen as more conservative than liberal, and more supportive of lower taxes and smaller government. Taking this argument one step further, then, we ought to expect right-of-centre party leaders to have perceived strengths in leadership and morality, while left-of-centre leaders should possess traits like compassion and empathy. There is no reason to believe that the partisan stereotype should apply only in the United States. Parties play up their strengths in election campaigns around the world, and thus a similar effect ought to exist across national boundaries. Finally, we ought to expect that less sophisticated voters are the most likely to evaluate leaders according to the partisan stereotypes: ‘since this information is readily available while other political information is costly, we would expect voters in low information conditions to use these cues when voting’ (McDermott 1998).
Less informed voters, who lack the knowledge or political sophistication required to make voting decisions based on policy, may decide whether or not they like the party’s leader, and vote for the party largely on that basis. This mirrors the notion put forth by Sniderman et al. (1991), who suggest that people can figure out what they oppose or support if they can simplify their options, and that among the less educated, affect (or how you feel towards something or someone) plays a significant role in explaining policy preferences. Essentially, you may not know a lot about a candidate, but with relative ease, you can decide whether or not you like him or her, and you can therefore simplify your vote choice by acting on that feeling.
1.2 Method
To better understand the role of leaders in elections, a comparative analysis is necessary. I argue that, in large part, the reason for the lack of agreement in the literature is the nature of the studies that have been conducted to date— for the most part, they have been based on single election studies which often examine distinct survey questions. I suggest that, by looking at a common set of variables across countries and over time, we will be able to obtain more conclusive evidence about the origins of evaluations of leaders’ traits and the impact of those perceptions on elections.
Early in the study of person perception and leadership candidates, Kinder et al. (1980) suggested that the presidential prototype consists of two main types of qualities: personality and performance. Since this time, a number of
21
scholars have expended a substantial amount of time to determine the extent to which these categories or dimensions of traits actually structure the way voters think about traits, or whether traits more realistically fit into other, different, dimensions. Over the years, scholars have suggested that voters evaluate traits in categories numbering anywhere from two to twelve (see, e.g., Bean 1993; Bean and Mughan 1989; Brettschneider and Gabriel 2002; Brown et al. 1988; Glass 1985; Johnston 2002; Kinder 1983, 1986; Kinder et al. 1980; Miller et al. 1986; Stewart and Clarke 1992), with the majority suggesting that traits fall into substantially fewer than twelve, usually somewhere between two and four dimensions.
Building on this past research on the dimensionality of traits, recent, in-depth, longitudinal analysis of cross-national data suggests that traits fall within two main ‘umbrella’ dimensions: competence and character (Bittner 2011).1 Traits in the competence dimension include traits such as leadership, knowledgeable, intelligent, and inspiring, while the character dimension includes traits such as cares, honest, trustworthy, and compassionate.
This analysis is based on thirty-five election studies from a total of seven countries with useable closed-ended questions about leaders’ traits.2 Concatenating these studies results in a dataset with over 186,000 respondents, and over 400 variables, all coded in a similar format. Crucial variables to this analysis include evaluations of leaders’ traits, and in addition to trait evaluations, the dataset incorporates variables such as party and leader thermometers, demographic variables, attitudes towards issues, vote choice, partisanship, media exposure, and political sophistication. All traits were coded on a 0–1 scale, with 1 representing the most positive evaluation of the leader on a given trait, and 0 representing the most negative evaluation of the leader on the trait. These evaluations were then combined to create an index for each of the two trait dimensions (character and competence). By doing this for each of the main party leaders in each of the elections in question, we are able to compare voters’ perceptions of the party leaders along the two different trait dimensions.3 The following section assesses the results of the analyses.
1 These dimensions were identified through a series of stacked correlation analyses, based on the evaluations of party leaders in 35 different election studies. For details about analyses, as well as complete list of all traits in each dimension, see Bittner (2011).
2 The complete list of studies includes: the Australian Election Study (including 1987, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2004); the British Election Study (including 1983, 1987, 1992, 1997, and 2001); the Canadian Election Study (including 1968, 1984, 1988, 1993, 1997, 2000, 2004, and 2006); the German Election Study (including 1980 and 1987); the National Election Study (from the US, including 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004), the National Annenberg Election Study (US, 2000); the New Zealand Election Study (including 1999 and 2002); and the Swedish Election Study (including 1988 and 1991).
3 Comparing evaluations of party leaders across countries comes with considerable methodological challenges, first and foremost, in terms of grouping parties into ‘types’. Because, e.g., the German FDP does not exist in Canada, and because the British Labour Party does not exist in the
Amanda Bittner
1.3 Results
1.3.1 Conservative Leaders Are More ‘Competent,’ Left Leaders Have More ‘Character’
The data indicate that indeed, individuals do perceive leaders through a partisan lens, and that this is not merely an American phenomenon. Voters perceive the leaders of Conservative and Left parties as having party-specific personality strengths, and these perceptions are based solely on the party label of the leader. Conservative leaders are rated more positively on the Competence dimension, while Left party leaders are rated more positively on the Character dimension. This partisan stereotype exists, even when we control for the partisanship of the voter, thus it is not simply a projection effect where those feeling an affinity to the Left party imagine that their leaders must display these characteristics. Partisans of different parties see the leaders in the same stereotypic way.
Figure 1.1 illustrates this trend through the use of box plots: the upper graph in the figure depicts evaluations of competence of the leaders of the three main party types, while the lower graph in the figure depicts evaluations of character. The line in the middle of each box represents the median evaluation of the leaders’ competence or character.
As the figure makes clear, there are distinct differences in how respondents perceive leaders on the two dimensions. Conservative leaders are perceived to hold particular strengths on the Competence dimension, with median ratings of 0.667, while Left leaders obtain a median rating of 0.5 on this dimension. On the Character dimension, Conservative leaders obtain a median rating of 0.556, while the median for Left leaders is 0.667. Centre-Left leaders fall in between the two on both dimensions.
US, using each country’s party label for cross-national analysis is not feasible. However, there are commonalities among parties from different countries, and scholars have expended considerable effort to develop cross-national comparisons between parties based on party policies and platforms. Examples include expert surveys (Benoit and Laver 2007) and the Comparative Manifesto Project (Budge et al. 2001). See McDonald, Mendes, and Kim 2007 for a review of these efforts. My analysis makes use of Benoit and Laver’s (2007) extensive work, which maps parties along two dimensional lines: stances on social liberalism and on taxes versus spending. I categorized parties according to their placement along these two dimensions, grouping parties with similar locations into the same group or category. Party categories included ‘Conservative’ (including the Canadian Conservatives, the American Republicans, the British Conservatives, the German CDU and CSU, the Australian Liberals, and the Swedish Moderate Party); ‘Centre-Left’ (including the Canadian Liberals, British Labour, New Zealand Labour, Australian Labour, the German SPD, and the US Democratic party); ‘Left’ (which includes the Canadian NDP, the Swedish Left Party, the New Zealand Alliance, the British Liberal Democrats, and the Australian Democrats); ‘Centre-Right’ (which includes the Swedish Centre Party, the New Zealand National Party, New Zealand ACT, the Swedish Peoples Party, and the German FDP); ‘Right’ (which includes New Zealand First, Australian ONE, Australian Nationals, Swedish Christian, Swedish NDP, and the Canadian Reform Party); ‘Green’ (which includes the Swedish, Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, and German Green Parties); and ‘Sectional’ (which includes the Canadian Bloc Quebecois, the Scottish National Party, and the Welsh Plaid Cymru). By aggregating parties into these groups, it was then possible to analyse evaluations of the leaders of these different parties en masse, because of the new common nomenclature.
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These differences may not seem important as basic summary statistics, but when slightly more sophisticated analyses are performed, the effect of the party label becomes clearer. Table 1.1 expands on the trends in Figure 1.1. The table depicts the results of a stacked regression analysis, in which evaluations of the character and competence of leaders of the three main party types were regressed on dummy variables indicating the party label of the leader.4
1
0.8
0.6
0.667
Conservative Centre-Left Left
Figure 1.1. Summary Statistics: Evaluations of Three Main Party Leaders’ Competence and Character. *Median values marked by horizontal bar inside of block.
4 Stacking the data involved changing the nature of the data matrix. The original format reflected a set-up in which each observation was one respondent, and evaluations for each individual leader on each individual trait were separate variables. By stacking the data, individual
Amanda Bittner
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That the coefficients are statistically significant is not particularly noteworthy, given the large sample size. More important is that the data illustrate that Conservative leaders are rated more negatively than Centre-Left leaders on the Character dimension, while Left leaders are rated substantially more positively than Centre-Left leaders on this same dimension. At the same time, Conservative leaders are rated more positively on the Competence dimension, and Left leaders are rated more negatively than Centre-Left leaders on this dimension. The pattern of the partisan stereotype is evident, and persists beyond the simple summary statistics presented in Figure 1.1.
Furthermore, analysis of the traits within these two dimensions suggests that these relationships are not simply the result of perceptions of leaders on a particular trait within the dimension. Table 1.2 lists the results of analyses performed to determine the difference in means between leaders on the ten most frequently asked personality traits (five in the Character dimension and five in the Competence dimension).5 The coefficients indicate that not only do voters assess leaders within a partisan stereotype on dimensions as a whole, but that they do so with regards to specific traits as well.
The table compares evaluations of Conservative leaders with evaluations of Left leaders and displays perceptions of the stereotypes quite clearly. That
Table 1.1. Effects of Party Label on Evaluation of Leader’s Traits
Competence Character
Conservative leader 0.028 (0.001) −0.004 (0.001) Left leader −0.040 0.109 Centre-Left leader (reference) — — Number of observations 299463 301649 Clusters 137816 138079 R-squared 0.11 0.12
Stacked Ordinary Least Squares Regression Analysis. Robust Standard errors in parentheses (clustered on the individual). Fixed Effects (Dummy Variables for each Election Study) included in the model. Coefficients significant at minimum 5% level in bold.
trait evaluations for individual leaders were no longer separate variables. So e.g., a respondent’s individual ratings of Centre-Left, Left, and Conservative leaders on the ‘character’ dimension were stacked one on top of another under the variable name ‘character,’ and thus each respondent was associated with three separate observations instead of just one. This facilitated the analysis of the variable ‘character’ as a single entity, rather than three separate variables: ‘conservative character,’ ‘centre-left character,’ and ‘left character’. This methodological choice was not essential for the analysis presented in Table 1.1, but made more sense when controlling for voters’ partisanship, as presented in Tables 1.3 and 1.4. For the sake of continuity, the data were stacked for all analyses.
5 A total of 55 traits are included across the two dimensions. Only the ten most frequently asked traits are included in Table 1.2 for ease of presentation. The patterns identified are consistent across most of the individual traits, as well as being consistent across the two dimensions as a whole.
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is, Conservative leaders score substantially higher than Left leaders on the five most frequently asked ‘competence’ traits: leadership, knowledgeable, intelligent, inspiring, and arrogant; while the negative coefficients at the bottom of the table indicate that Left leaders are rated more highly than Conservative leaders on the five most frequently asked ‘character’ traits: cares, honest, compassionate, trustworthy, and moral. That the perceived strengths of Conservative and Left leaders emerge in specific traits, as well as in the aggregated dimensions, provides further support for the notion that the partisan stereotype has an enduring influence over voters’ perceptions of party leaders.
The pattern whereby Left leaders are perceived more positively on the character dimension and Conservative leaders are perceived more positively on the competence dimension is not simply a pattern of one or two elections in one or two countries. Indeed, generally speaking, where respondents were asked to evaluate leaders from all three party types, the pattern holds for nearly all elections, as evidenced by Figure 1.2.
The lower chart depicts average evaluations of the competence of leaders of the three main party types, compared to all other party leaders, while the upper chart does the same for evaluations of the leaders’ character. Elections are ordered in relation to the extent to which the ratings of the leaders fit the partisan stereotype; that is, moving towards the far right of the first graph, Conservative leaders are perceived most strongly on the Competence dimension in comparison to all other leaders. As we move to the right of the second graph, Left leaders are perceived most strongly on the Character dimension in comparison to all other leaders. The graphs illustrate that evaluations of the leaders of the Left and Conservative leaders
Table 1.2. Difference in Means on Evaluations of Most Frequently Asked Traits
Conservative Leaders vs. Left Leaders
Competence Leadership 0.150 Knowledgeable 0.043 Intelligent 0.062 Arrogant 0.152 Inspiring 0.015
Character Compassionate −0.139 Trustworthy −0.057 Cares −0.254 Moral −0.165
0
Comparing Major Parties: Ratings of Character by Level of Political Sophistication
Comparing Major Parties: Ratings of Competence by Level of Political Sophistication
0.621 0.549 0.573
Figure 1.2. Evaluations of Leaders’ Character and Competence: Comparing Leaders of Three Main Parties to Average of All Leaders. *Median values marked by horizontal bar inside of block.
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generally fit the partisan stereotype, when respondents are asked to evaluate all three. When Left leaders are not included in the choice set, the pattern is not quite as stark.6 It appears that the act of comparison itself might play a crucial role in activating respondents’ perceptions of the partisan stereotype.
According to Conover (1981), comparison is an explicit part of the activa- tion of cues. She suggests that voters will look at a field of candidates and note the obvious differences between them, including differences of partisanship. She states: ‘contextual factors such as the minority status of one candidate as compared to others—be it ideological, partisan, racial, or sexual in nature— may encourage voters to apply the stereotype associated with the minority group to the individual. . . the “conservative label”, for example, should be a more salient cue in a field of candidates in which one is a conservative and the rest are moderates and liberals’ (1981, 433). These findings support others who suggest that the act of comparison is key. Rahn et al. (1990) run their candidate models in two ways: first, separately for each candidate; and second, using comparative scores for judgements. They find that the comparative model is more accurate and suggest that ‘the entire judgemental process appears to be comparative’ (1990, 119).
It is not entirely clear what exactly is activating this partisan stereotype. What is clear, however, is that this partisan stereotype is not simply partisanship by another name. In fact, when we control for the partisanship of the voter, the extent to which individuals perceive leaders within the partisan stereotype framework becomes even more evident. Table 1.3 lists the results of a stacked regression analysis, in which evaluations of the character and competence of the three main party leaders were regressed on a series of ‘partisan’ dummy variables. A dummy variable was created for the party label of each leader, and this variable was interacted with dummy variables for the partisanship of the voter. There are five groups of partisans—Centre-Left, Conservative, Left, Non-Partisans (those claiming to be either Independents or to have no partisan affiliation), and Partisans of ‘Other’ Parties. The coefficients in the table represent the ratings of the leaders of each of the three main party types, across different groups of partisans.
A number of noteworthy effects emerge. First, there is an overwhelm- ing effect of individual-level partisanship. That is, all partisans view the leader of their own party most positively. Individuals identifying with a Conservative party view Conservative leaders most positively on both dimensions, those claiming an affiliation with a Centre-Left party rate Centre-Left leaders most positively on both dimensions, and Left partisans
6 Results not shown.
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perceive their own party leaders most positively on both dimensions. After their own leader, however, partisans of the three main parties rate Conservative leaders more highly on competence, and Left leaders more highly on character. So, while voters still perceive the leader of their own party most positively, they rate the remaining leaders according to the partisan stereotype.
Among both non-partisans and ‘other’ partisans, perceptions of leaders follow the stereotype most clearly. Non-partisans rate Left leaders more positively on the Character dimension, and Conservative leaders more positively on the Competence dimension. Partisans of other parties do the same. That this dynamic exists among non-partisans and ‘other’ partisans provides the greatest indication that voters really do perceive leaders according to a partisan stereotype, and that this is not simply about voters perceiving the leaders of their own parties in a positive light. Furthermore, these models include
Table 1.3. Effects of Voters’ Partisanship and Leaders’ Party on Evaluations of Personality Traits
Character Competence
Centre-Left Partisans Centre-Left PID & Conservati

Personality Politics?: The Role of Leader Evaluations in Democratic Elections

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