How Candidates Leverage Campaign Messages to Attenuate Negative Evaluations

• In Event: Effective Campaigns

Abstract

Recent optimism has fueled a groundswell of first-time African-American, Latino, and women candidates running for office (Traister 2018; Wilson 2018)—suggesting a new wave of diverse candidates. The demographic composition of elected legislatures is a legitimate democratic concern (Phillips 1995), as the election of underrepresented politicians positively influences both the motivation of future candidates (Gilardi 2015) and policy outcomes (Carnes 2012; Reingold and Smith 2012). And yet, while women and racial minorities have made tremendous strides, there is continued underrepresentation at the national level.

The scholarship on voter perceptions of candidate competency is oft cited as a culprit (Holman, Merolla, and Zechmeister 2011; Huddy and Terkildsen 1993; Tesler 2013). This literature finds evidence of negative social expectations such that voters, on average, perceive of men as more capable candidates and perceive of minorities as less intelligent, poor leaders (Holman 2011, Tesler 2013). Nevertheless, while voters may form negative impressions of candidates that do not immediately fit traditional expectations (Dittmar 2015; Fiske et al. 2002), equal electoral success rates demonstrate that voters are not biased against women and racial minority candidates (Dolan 2005; Highton 2004; Pearson and McGhee 2013).

New scholarship accounts for this conundrum by arguing that candidates address voter perceptions through their campaign strategy and messages (Cryer 2018; Dittmar 2015). Even while voters hold attitudes about demographic groups, they likely perceive of candidate identity as a single piece of information to be analyzed and processed (Ditonto 2014). Thus the effects of voters' attitudes regarding gender and race are attenuated by other information (Mo 2014; Bullock 2011; Kunda and Thagard 1996). Candidates are aware of the voter expectations regarding identity, and the degree to which these judgments may undercut their valence and electoral outcomes. Thus, women and racial minority candidates respond to anticipated deficits in voter perceptions by discussing their experience, competency, and individualistic work ethic to a greater degree (Cryer 2018; Karpowitz et al. 2015).

We might expect that in the absence of these campaign messages, voters will penalize racial minority and women candidates, due to negative social expectations. Contrastingly, the use of strategies addressing competencies and strategic issue ownership may be expected to positively influence voter perceptions of candidate competency, attenuating negative racial and gender attitudes through the delivery of information about quality. While there is plentiful literature about the characteristics of successful candidates (Campbell and Cowley 2014; Druckman, Jacobs, and Ostermeier 2004; Popkin 1994), little research has explored how to the communication of these characteristics influences voter attitudes regarding race and gender.

To analyze how voter perceptions are influenced by these communication strategies, I conducted forced-choice, paired-conjoint, experiments (Hainmueller, Hangartner, and Yamamoto 2015) to reveal under what conditions voters alter support for, or assessments of, underrepresented candidates. To specifically account for the variation in candidate messages and attributes that respondents perceive as ideal, I utilize a corpus of candidate website and Wikipedia biographies pre-measured for the proportion of strategies used (Cryer 2018; Fong and Grimmer 2016). The application of insights from large-scale text analysis grounds the conjoint experiment design by using a more accurate construction of campaign messages available in the information environment.

Results from the conjoint experiment indicated that when provided with basic information about candidate demographics, voters on average evaluated the competencies and issue capabilities of racial minority candidates negatively. Candidates in racial minority groups on average were associated with perceptions of weak leadership, low rationality and intelligence, and weakness in economic and foreign policy. Racial minority candidates were associated with a lower probability of voter support. Alternatively, women faced little penalty in terms of vote choice but were less likely to be perceived as strong leaders. The marginal effects of highlighting image-management, individualism, and experience were positive and significant—exceeding the race-penalty and improving perceptions of women as weak leaders. Importantly, the interaction effect of gender and message, as well as race and message, showed that underrepresented candidates benefit from these strategies to a statistically significant greater degree—this effect is especially heightened in races against out-group opponents.

Taken together, these findings suggest that candidate messaging may provide an account for why women and racial minority candidates are able to obtain electoral success despite evidence of voter biases.

Author

• Jennifer E. Cryer, Stanford University