In Iowa’s Senate race, massive levels of outside spendingdominate how the candidates are portrayed to voters

The potential Republican victory in Iowa has been the focus of a great deal of press attention, but it is just one of the interesting stories surrounding this election. Following recent Supreme Court decisions, including the notable Citizens United case, campaigns have experienced a revolution in spending changes. These changes, which are clearly on display in the Hawkeye State, write David Andersen and Tessa Ditonto, have fundamentally transformed what it means to campaign for office in the United States and could be a crucial factor in determining the winner of this election, as well as the balance of power in the Senate

A High Bar or a Double Standard? Gender, Competence, and Information in Political Campaigns

This study seeks to determine whether subjects in two dynamic process tracing experiments react differently to information related to a candidate’s competence when that candidate is a woman, vs. when he is a man. I find that subjects evaluate a candidate whose competence is in doubt less favorably, and are less likely to vote for the candidate, when she is a woman. In general, evaluations of women seem to be influenced much more by information related to their competence than are evaluations of men. I also find that competence as portrayed by the composition of a candidate’s facial features does not alter this relationship. My findings suggest that gender-based stereotypes may have an indirect effect on candidate evaluations and vote choice by influencing how voters react to information about them

Differences in Appearance-Based Trait Inferences for Male and Female Political Candidates

Studies show that automatic trait inferences can predict outcomes of actual elections, but these studies generally include male candidates only. Substantial evidence also shows that female candidates are subject to gender-based stereotypes, which can lead to differences in how men and women candidates are evaluated. This article combines these two literatures to compare the effects of competence, threat, and attractiveness inferences in elections that include women. We use experimental data in which candidate pairs from state and local US elections were judged on these three traits and examine whether those ratings are predictive of election outcomes. We find that although competence matters most for elections involving only men, attractiveness predicts winners in women-only elections. In mixed-gender races, competence inferences predict success when the female candidate is perceived as more competent than the male candidate. Finally, unlike men, women benefit from being perceived as physically threatening in mixed-gender races

Information and its Presentation: Treatment Effects in Low-Information vs. High-Information Experiments

This article examines how the presentation of information during a laboratory experiment can alter a study’s findings. We compare four possible ways to present information about hypothetical candidates in a laboratory experiment. First, we manipulate whether subjects experience a low-information or a high-information campaign. Second, we manipulate whether the information is presented statically or dynamically. We find that the design of a study can produce very different conclusions. Using candidate’s gender as our manipulation, we find significant effects on a variety of candidate evaluation measures in low-information conditions, but almost no significant effects in high-information conditions. We also find that subjects in high-information settings tend to seek out more information in dynamic environments than static, though their ultimate candidate evaluations do not differ. Implications and recommendations for future avenues of study are discussed

How negative ads from diverse right-wing media makes conservative voters dislike Democratic candidates even more

Recent years have seen growing hostility between those who support different political parties in America. But what is the media’s role in creating this increasing dislike? In new research, Richard Lau, David Andersen, Tessa Ditonto, Mona Kleinberg and David Redlawsk investigate this “affective polarization” by exposing participants to different news sources and positive and negative political advertising. They find that hostility towards the opposite party is at its highest when conservative subjects are exposed to negative ads and can customize their news environment

AMPing Racial Attitudes: Comparing the Power of Explicit and Implicit Racism Measures in 2008

In 2008, ANES included for the first time—along with standard explicit measures of old-fashioned and symbolic racism—the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public opinion during and after the 2008 election, including Americans' views towards several racial policy issues, their evaluations of, and feelings toward, Barack Obama, and their attitudes toward a Black president in general. Oversamples of African American and Latino respondents in the 2008 ANES enable us to broaden our tests of these measures beyond traditional White samples. We find that racial prejudice played an important role for all racial/ethnic groups but that the traditional explicit measures of racism are by far the stronger predictors for all of our dependent variables (compared to the new implicit measure) for both White and Black respondents. Surprisingly, the AMP adds clear explanatory power only to models in the Latino sample

Measuring Voter Decision Strategies in Political Behavior and Public Opinion Research

Although political science has advanced the study of voter decision-making, the discipline still understands very little about how citizens go about reaching those decisions. In this article, we introduce a five-factor self-report scale of political decision-making (PolDec-5) administered to six different samples with more than 6,500 respondents over the past four years. Analyses illustrate that our five subscales—Rational Choice, Confirmatory, Fast and Frugal, Heuristic-Based, and Going with Your Gut—have high internal consistency, relatively high discriminant validity (as they are largely distinct from existing measures of decision-making style), and significantly high predictive validity, as established by process tracing studies where actual decision strategies of voters can be observed directly. Finally, we discuss how these new measures can help predict important political outcomes

Direct and indirect effects of prejudice: sexism, information, and voting behavior in political campaigns

This paper examines the effects of gender-based prejudice on candidate evaluation and voting behavior. It uses a unique experimental design to test for direct effects of sexism on candidate evaluation and voting behavior, as well as indirect effects of sexism on these variables via the information that subjects seek out about women candidates. I find that subjects with higher scores on items measuring modern sexism are less likely to vote for female candidates, less likely to vote “correctly” when their preferences most closely align with a female candidate, and rate female candidates more negatively than their male counterparts. I also find that subjects high in sexism search for less information about women candidates and that less information search also leads to lower feeling thermometer ratings, a lower likelihood of voting for women candidates, and a lower likelihood of casting a “correct” vote for a woman. In sum, sexism has both direct and indirect effects on subjects’ voting behavior