Do Voters Want Candidates They Like or Candidates They Agree With?Affect vs. Cognition in Voter Decision Making

Do Voters Want Candidates They Like or Candidates They Agree With? Affect vs. Cognition in Voter Decision Making

David P. Redlawsk University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa 52242 [email protected] Richard R. Lau Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ 08903 [email protected]

March 15, 2003

Abstract All candidates try to paint as favorable a picture of themselves as possible, and when voters find a candidate who agrees with them on the issues, is smart, trustworthy, and generally good looking and likeable to boot, the vote choice is quite easy. But what happens when voters are faced with flawed candidates, who are either good looking and likeable, but hold issue positions a voter generally disagrees with, or hold all the right policy stands but look like Richard Nixon with a 4 o-clock shadow, and act like Bob Dole before they invented Viagra? Both conventional wisdom and some previous research would seem to suggest that when push comes to shove, image generally trumps substance. We revisit this question in the context of a mock presidential election campaign where in both the primary and the general election, voters faced a choice between candidates flawed in these two complementary ways. We do not simply assume that voters are simply passive recipients of whatever information candidates would like the voters to see. Instead, a dynamic process tracing methodology allows voters to expose themselves to varying amounts of issue- and image-related information about all candidates. Voters in our experiment generally preferred the dislikeable candidate they agree with on the issues over the much more likeable candidate they disagreed with on the issues. In both the primary and general election campaigns, the type of information voters chose to expose themselves to had a major impact on the vote decision.

Paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 3-6, 2003. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Shambaugh Conference on Affect and Cognition in Political Action, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, March 6-9, 2003

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Do Voters Want Candidates They Like or Candidates They Agree With? Affect vs. Cognition in Voter Decision Making *

The importance of a candidate’s physical image in presenting him or herself has been understood by candidates and their handlers probably for as long as campaigns have existed. Common phrases such as “clothes make the man [woman]” and “looks can be deceiving” tell us much about how human beings are impacted by the visual (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, 1972.) McGuiness (1988), in his groundbreaking book about the Nixon campaign, describes how the advertising executives hired by Nixon thought long and hard about how his visual image would come across on television, knowing that they needed to create a “new Nixon” in order to win in 1968. Why an emphasis on the “person” rather than the “issues”? Probably because the advertising executives were convinced it would work in a time when more and more people got their political information from television. Since that time, of course, the rise of candidate-centered campaigning has been well documented (Wattenberg, 1992), as party labels and perhaps issues have become less important and the individual candidate moreso. It may be that in 2000, Vice-president Al Gore was at a distinct disadvantage to Texas Governor George Bush, given the general consensus that although quite knowledgeable on the issues – sort of a “policy wonk” – Gore appeared wooden and often less than likeable, while Bush despite his apparent limited grasp of many issue details, came across as warm and approachable. Certainly in 1980 relatively few voters shared the “Reagan agenda” of a strong policy shift rightward, yet he won that election convincingly, and the next by a landslide. Candidate image and personality clearly play a role, perhaps even the leading role, when voters evaluate candidates (Ottati, 1990; Riggle, Ottati, Wyer, Kuklinski, and Scharz, 1992.) Yet, while campaign consultants know in their gut that image matters, a surprisingly limited amount of political science research has attempted to address directly the question of how substantial a role image plays when compared to other information voters may acquire. That voters respond affectively as well as cognitively towards candidates is not seriously doubted (Granberg and Brown, 1989; Glaser and Salovey, 1998, Redlawsk, 2002.) While there may be some disagreement about the mechanisms of affective response in politics (Marcus and MacKuen, 1993; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen. 2000; Lodge and Taber, 2000) there is no doubt that politics is about feeling at least as much as it is about thinking. Voters potentially have a wide variety of information that may be considered when evaluating candidates. Issue positions, group endorsements, the candidate’s visual image, personality, and experience are all clearly important factors in voter decision making (Lau and Redlawsk, 1997; 2001.) If all of these considerations aligned themselve s consistently in some election, the choice would be easy. But we doubt this happens very frequently outside of the movies, where the hero is always smart, trustworthy, holds all the right issue positions, and looks like Robert Redford. More often, a cand idate might have “good” positions on issues, but appear to have limited relevant experience. Another candidate might appear quite attractive physically, but not be supported by the groups with which a voter identifies. Further, some of the information may trigger more thoughtful cognitive processing (issue positions, group endorsements), while other types of information might trigger first a strong emotional or affective reaction. There is reason to believe that visual images and *

Support for data collection and analyses came from National Science Foundation grants SBR-9411162 to the first author and SBR-9321236 to the second author. Redlawsk gratefully acknowledges support from the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa.

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personality traits fall into this latter category (Lanzetta, Sullivan, Masters, and McHugo, 1985; Sullivan and Masters, 1988.) What if voters have to choose between a candidate who is physically attractive and generally likeable but on the wrong side of important issues, and one who takes issue positions more favorable to the voter but who is noticeably less attractive and sporting quite unlikable traits? What then? Do the non-verbal (affective) cues inherent in physical image override the (cognitive) information provided by issue stands? And what if personality traits reinforce the physical image? Candidate attractiveness goes beyond the physical, including not just images, but personality traits that people find more or less endearing. In a series of studies, Rosenberg and McCafferty, (1987; Rosenberg, Bohan, McCafferty, and Harris, 1986) report experimental evidence that a photo showing a person’s physical appearance “communicates a clear and politically relevant image of that person’s character.” (1987, p. 114). Further, they find that controlling for candidate party and issue positions, physical appearance independently influences voter decisions, with attractive candidates more likely to garner support than unattractive ones. These studies focused only on physical appearance, and provided subjects with relatively little information about the candidates’ issues positions, giving only three stances for each candidate. As with most experiments that provide campaign information to subjects, the information was easily processed, and limited; for example, no information was provided about candidate backgrounds or personality traits. Budesheim and DePaola (1994) did provide some personality information as they examined the individual and joint effects of image (defined as both visual image and a limited set of personality traits) and issues on the evaluation of political candidates. Their results are suggestive of the importance of image broadly defined, as they found that issue positions have substantially less impact on evaluations than do the combination of a candidate’s picture and personality. Their focus is clearly on evaluation rather than the vote choice, but still it seems clear that image and attractiveness (defined broadly) are more important than issues when it comes to thinking about candidates. It is important to recognize that while candidate-centered information such as pictures or personality traits may trigger an emotional or affective reaction this does not mean they carry no content for cognitive processing. It is certainly reasonable to think that a candidate’s personality is relevant information for what it signals about the potential behavior of the candidate if elected; a politician’s personality is highly likely to have some influence on how he or she chooses from the myriad of actions available in every situation (Greenstein, 1969). Likewise, while we tend to think of issue positions in terms of how they are processed cognitively by voters, recent research suggests that one cannot simply separate affective reactio ns to candidate positions from the cognitive processing of those issues (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen. 2000, Lodge & Taber, 2000; Redlawsk, 2002.) Nonetheless, both conventional wisdom in the media and scientific research into the question has generally suggested that “image” in some way trumps issue agreement, and thus that affective, emotional reactions to candidates are perhaps more significant that cognitive ones. We are not so sure – or at least we see the question as far from settled because the research to date has not really explored what happens to candidate evaluation and choice in the type of environment that voters experience during a typical election campaign. Previous experimental studies have provided only very limited information about cand idates, and in a dry, static format such that subjects have little choice but to process it. They have failed to consider the role a competitive campaign plays over time, when voters are choosing between two or more alternative candidates. And they have certainly given no role to the voter is shaping his or her own information environment. 3

What is needed is an examination of the roles candidate image and issue stands play in both evaluation and choice when voters encounter a reasonable analogue of a political campaign, where a wide range of information can be either processed or ignored about each or several candidates over a period of time. Using a unique computer-based dynamic process tracing methodology (Lau, 1995; Lau and Redlawsk, 1997; 2001; Redlawsk, 2002) that allows us to track information search during a mock election campaign, we can directly test how candidate-centered information such as pictures and personality compares with issue-oriented information in influencing voters’ evaluations and decisions. This paper reports on an experiment in which subjects have to choose between a visually appealing candidate with likeable personality traits but who was relatively distant on important issues, and a less appealing, less likeable candidate who was much closer to the subject on the key issues of the campaign. Moreover, because our procedure allows all subjects a great deal of discretion in the information they choose to learn about any candidate, we can consider whether voters have different proclivities towards seeking out and learning different types of information about candidates, and whether those proclivities help explain the effectiveness of our manipulation. An obvious extension of Lau’s (1986, 1989) research on “chronically accessible political constructs” (see also Bargh, 198x) would suggest that voters should have such differential proclivities, to the extent people actively construct their information environments -- one of the basic assumptions of our research program – although we know of no evidence on this point in the larger chronic accessibility literature. Process Tracing Our experiment begins with process tracing a technique for following decision making as it occurs. While we have described the methodology in detail elsewhere (Lau, 1995; Lau and Redlawsk, 1997, 2001; Redlawsk, 2001, 2002) we will provide an overview of the technique here. Process tracing broadly defined simply is a means to follow the decision making processes in which people engage as they learn about alternatives and choose between them. Where most attempts at process tracing in political science have used a relatively simple static display of information in an easy to use grid format, such a format fails to adequately mimic the chaotic nature of an election campaign, where information comes and goes over time, and may often be overwhelming, at least for those paying attention. 1 We have addressed this problem by designing a dynamic process tracing board that presents election campaigns to subjects who learn about candidates over time as the campaigns progress. There is far more information available than anyone could possibly process, and thus voters must be selective in what types of information they want to consider. The system allows us to set up campaigns with varying numbers of candidates, with varying amounts and types of information, and to manipulate any number of underlying conditions about the candidates or the campaigns themselves. The dynamic process tracing board radically revises the standard technique to better model the campaign environment. Where the traditional information board is an ideal world, the dynamic board creates a complicated environment where information flows over time, coming and going as the campaign progresses. In choosing to examine one piece of information a voter may be forgoing the opportunity to learn something else since new information appears and older information disappears 1

See, for example, Herstein, 1981, whose study of voter decision making using a static information board where subjects were tracked as they selected cards from a board came up with the interesting finding that the partisanship of candidates was not an important factor in an election. Riggle and Johnson (1996) and Huang (2000; Huang and Price, 2001) have used computerized versions of the basic static information board to examine how voters process different kinds of information.

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from the environment all the time. The information attribute labels "scroll" down the computer screen, rather than remaining fixed in place, and only a limited number are visible at any one time. As with the static board, most attribute labels include a candidate's name and the particular information that would be revealed if the label were accessed (e.g. "Martin's stand on Welfare"). As information behind the label is accessed by clicking on the label with the mouse, the scrolling continues in the background, creating a "cost" in terms of missed information, and thus mimicking the dynamic nature of election information flow. Only a small subset of a very large database of information is available at any one time, and the task of processing campaign information is much less manageable. In addition, the relative likelihood of any particular piece of information becoming available is controlled, so that some information (like party identification) is much easier to get (i.e., appears much more often) than other types of information (such as an obscure policy position). Our mock election campaigns also include 20 second political advertisements, which periodically take over the computer screen (as they do our television screens at home). With this design, the dynamic information board provides a much closer real world analog of a political campaign compared to the static information board. We can use the dynamic system to follow the search process as voters wade through the wide range of issue, candidate personality, group endorsement, and polling information that makes up the typical campaign. While the dynamic board is certainly not a “real” campaign, it mimics well the chaotic information environment that prevails in competitive elections as all candidates do their best to make themselves known and voters try to learn the information they need to make a choice. Procedure Subjects were recruited from the Central New Jersey area in the summer and fall of 1995. A nonprobability sample of 196 subjects participated in the study. All subjects were required to be eligible U.S. voters, although they did not have to actually be registered to vote. Subjects could not currently be attending college. Just over half (51%) of subjects were male, 79.7% were white, and 13.5% Black, with an average age of 40.5 (ranging from 18 to 82.) Subjects were well educated, with 37.0% holding at least a BA degree, though 26.2% had not attended college at all. Finally, subjects were evenly distributed through the range of family incomes from under $15,000 to over $75,000. The study began with the completion of a political attitudes questionnaire about political knowledge, interests, and preferences. After practicing on the computer, subjects participated in a simulated presidential primary election with two Democrats and two Republicans competing for their party’s nomination, followed by a general election campaign with one of the Democrats facing one of the Republicans. 2 The candidates in the elections, while fictitious, were designed to represent a realistic spectrum of ideologies across both major political parties. Before the primary election, subjects “registered” with a political party, and were subsequently constrained to vote only for candidates from that party, although information was available about candidates from both parties during the campaign. After the completion of the primary campaign (which lasted about 22 minutes) subjects voted and then rated all of the candidates on a 101-point feeling thermometer. Next they answered questions about the difficulty of their decision, learned which candidates were running in the general election during a short break, and the began that election (which lasted about 12 minutes). Following the general election campaign, subjects again voted, evaluated candidates, and answered questions about the 2

See Lau and Redlawsk (1997, Fig. 2, 588) for a detailed summary of the typical procedure.

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difficulty of their decision. An unexpected memory test was then given about the candidates in the general election. Following this, subjects were debriefed, paid, and dismissed. Study Design In this study we use the dynamic board to examine the roles played by candidate pictures, personality, and issue positions in determining the vote. We designed an experiment pitting a relatively unattractive candidate who the voter agreed with on the issues, against a more personally attractive candidate who held many positions the voter disagreed with. We created two such pairings, one in the Democratic primary and one in the Republican primary. Attractiveness was operationalized in terms of both physical appearance and personality traits. For each candidate two pictures were created; one that was rated as relatively attractive in pre-testing and another image of the same person rated as unattractive. 3 These pictures were captured from the campaign ads of actual – but little known – candidates for Congress. Thus both the attractive and unattractive pictures were of the same person. Thus the variation in attractiveness that we manipulate is subtle and easily within the realm of what actually happens in many real campaigns. Some of us are just a little more attractive and a little more charming than others – and we all have our good days and our bad days – but we did not contrast beauty with the beast. Think Richard Nixon with and without his 4 o’clock shadow, rather than Nixon (with the shadow) vs. John Kennedy. The pictures were then paired with a set of personality trait statements, also rated as either relatively positive or relatively negative. The unattractive picture was paired with the more negative trait descriptions, while the attractive picture was paired with more positive trait descriptions. 4 Figure 1 displays the attractive and unattractive pictures of our four candidates, along with the likable and less likable personality descriptions associated with the different pictures. [Insert Figure 1 about here] We then took each candidate and assigned issue positions that were opposite of the candidate’s attractiveness. That is, unattractive candidates were assigned issue positions that were close to those espoused by a subject in response to a pre-experiment political attitudes questionnaire, while attractive candidates were assigned issue positions distant from the subject. But again, the variation in issue agreement was within the plausible range for American politics. We prepared eight different policy positions on every issue, four covering the range of stands typically found within the Democratic party (from the extreme left to slightly right of center), four covering the range of stands typically found within the Republican party (from slightly left of center to the extreme right). Each of our candidates was affiliated with one of the two major parties, and in choosing issue positions that were as close or as far as possible from the voter’s own positions, we selected from among the four which were available for that party. To make the general election choice as difficult as possible, we “fixed” the results of the primary elections so that the candidate the subject voted for in the primary election last the nomination, and the candidate the subject had rejected in the primary was the party’s nominee. The outparty’s candidate in the general election, however, was the same type of candidate the voter had preferred in the primary – 3

In order to establish the attractiveness of both the pictures and the personality traits, we had a separate set of 63 pretest subjects (college students) respond to a series of questions about each picture and/or personality description as they were randomly presented on a computer. The questions included “How attractive is the person?” and “How much would you like this person for a friend?” 4 The trait descriptions included a range of statements about the candidate’s personality, including descriptions from a friend, a staff worker, a political opponent, and a telling anecdote from the candidate’s mother.

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attractive but relatively distant on the issues, or relatively unattractive but as close as possible on the issues. Thus is voters were to choose the same type of candidate in the general election they had preferred in the primary, they would have to defect form their party affiliation to do so. The result of this process was a clear but difficult cho ice in the primary and again in the general election between two “flawed” candidates. It is important to note here that there was no such thing as “fixed” candidates in this experiment, and in fact it was probably the case that no two subjects ever faced a campaign involving exactly the same candidates – at least if by “candidate” we are referring to more than just their name and appearance. Each of our four candidates had a name and an attractive and unattractive picture and set of personality descriptions, although which candidate was assigned to the attractive and unattractive conditions was randomly assigned within each party. 5 It is also important to note that because our procedure for the most part allows voters to select the information they wished to learn about the candidates, subjects were differentially aware of the tradeoffs between choosing either candidate. Every subject was exposed to two ads from each candidate during the primary, and three ads from each candidate during the general election. The last five seconds of every ad was the candidate’s (attractive or unattractive) picture with a voiceover offering the candidates campaign theme (e.g., “Vote Pat Thomas for a new tomorrow.”) Thus all subjects saw each candidate’s picture at least twice, and this was the minimum level of “treatment” to which all subjects were exposed. However, all voters had many opportunities to choose to examine any candidate’s picture again, to choose to consider brief personality descriptions of the candidates from different people who know them, and to choose to learn about a variety of different issue stands from every candidate. But no voter had to look at any of these things, and very few subjects looked at every personality description of every candidate, or every issue stand that every candidate took. So the “strength” of our manipulation varies across voters. Results The experiment was designed to make subjects have to choose between a candidate who was close to them on the issues by with an unattractive personality and picture and a candidate who was distant on the issues but substantially more attractive. The analyses that follow all focus on this choice. Because of the significance of party in a general election, compared to a primary where party is not a deciding factor, we analyze our two elections independently. For each election we examine the actual vote, the evaluations of the candidates, the difficulty of the decision for the voter, who is likely to vote close versus attractive, and finally, the accuracy of the vote decision. Primary Election We begin by examining the results from our primary elections. Subjects participated in either a Republican or a Democratic primary with two candidates, as described earlier. Because voters are constrained to vote only within their party (though they could see the campaigns for both parties) 5

Or at least that was our intention. However, a computer programming error that we only caught at the very end of our data gathering led to the same Republican candidates being assigned to the attractive and unattractive conditions in virtually every primary election. That the Republican candidates’ names are confounded with condition is probably irrelevant, but our efforts to obtain attractive and unattractive images of the same person went to naught in the Republican primary. One person’s attractive picture was almost always used for the attractive but distant candidate in the Republican primary, while a different person’s unattractive picture was almost always used in the unattractive but close on the issues condition. Fortunately, this bug had no effect on assignment to the various candidate combinations in the general election.

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partisanship does not complicate these analyses. Table 1 reports the actual vote choice during the primaries, for both Republicans and Democrats. 6 Slightly more subjects voted for the close and unattractive candidate in their primary than for the distant/attractive candidate. At first glance this would seem to suggest that issue positions were generally seen to be more important than “image” – i.e., physical attractiveness and a good personality. Still, a substantial set of subjects chose the more distant candidate. These voters apparently ignored the fact that there was a candidate closer to them on the issues, or at least considered policy agreement to be less important than likableness. One possible explanation for this difference is expertise. Political experts may care more about issues that matter to them and may be more interested in the candidates’ positions on those issues. If so, experts might be more likely to vote for the close candidate, regardless of the personality/image of that candidate. During the pre-election questionnaire, subjects were asked a battery of questions about political interest, knowledge, and activity. These variables were combined into a single measure of political expertise, which was then divided at its median, with political experts coded high and novices coded low. Table 2 reports the vote in the primaries by political expertise, again examining Republicans and Democrats separately. The results are as expected. Experts are more likely to vote for the close/unattractive candidate than are novices (Democrats, X2 =2.723, p