Incivility, Candidate Attributes, and Voting Preference

• In Event: Don't Be Cruel: Incivility in Media and Campaigns

Abstract

Incivility, while it may at times engage voters,1 may also decrease trust in institutions.2 Yet little is known about how voters respond to political incivility from candidates—particularly from candidates with different characteristics and who use different types of incivility in their campaigns. Do uncivil candidates receive less support from voters, and, if so, which types of incivility are most damaging? Are non-white and women punished more harshly for use of incivility? Or is incivility—even in its more damaging forms—ignored as long as voters agree with a candidate’s issue position?

I answer these questions while extending previous political incivility research both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, much research concerning incivility in campaigns focuses on impoliteness and extreme negativity, an approach related to politeness theory.3 Yet research suggests that scholars and citizens also consider other types of messages and behaviors to be uncivil (e.g. spreading misinformation, threats to democracy, intolerance and discrimination).4 Further, although scholars have suggested that different characteristics can affect how individuals react to incivility,5 there has been less attention paid to the effect of the person engaging in the incivility. For instance, a social expectation that women and people of color remain polite and respectable6 could mean that political candidates who are women and/or from minoritized groups receive less support from voters when they use uncivil appeals. Thus, the current study tests the complications of incivility in a campaign setting, examining how varying types of incivility may (or may not) affect voter support given a variety of other candidate attributes (e.g. race, sex, issue positions).

This project also extends the methodological tools used to study incivility. Because there are so many factors at play in individuals’ judgments of a political candidate, the current study uses a novel method that has gained recent attention, though not in the area of incivility research: conjoint analysis.7 In this approach, respondents are provided a choice between two options (in this case, candidates for mayor) who vary randomly according to a number of attributes (in this case, race, sex, issue stance, current occupation, and a few types of incivility). This type of design allows researchers to better examine multidimensional decisions, making it highly appropriate in studying the role of candidate incivility in vote choice. Data have been collected for 1,000 respondents using Prime Panels. The results will provide insight into how different types of incivility—and the types of candidates who use incivility—are evaluated in the context of political campaigns.

Endnotes
1Brooks, D. J., & Geer, J. G. (2007). Beyond negativity: The effects of incivility on the electorate. American Journal of Political Science, 51(1), 1–16.

2Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. New York: Crown.; Searles, K., Spencer, S., & Duru, A. (Digital First). Don’t read the comments: the effects of abusive comments on perceptions of women authors’ credibility. Information Communication and Society.

3Mutz, D. C. (2015). In-your-face politics: The consequences of uncivil media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

4Muddiman, A. (2017). Personal and public levels of political incivility. International Journal of Communication, 11, 3182–3202.; Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. New Media & Society, 6(2), 259–283.; Rossini, P. (2019). Disentangling uncivil and intolerant discourse in online political talk. In A crisis of civility? Political discourse and its discontents (pp. 142–157). New York: Routledge.; Stryker, R., Conway, B. A., & Danielson, J. T. (2016). What is political incivility? Communication Monographs, 83(4), 535–556.

5Kenski, K., Coe, K., & Rains, S. A. (n.d.). Perceptions of uncivil discourse online: An examination of types and predictors. Communication Research.; Sydnor, E. (2019). Disrespectful democracy: The psychology of political incivility. New York: Columbia University Press.

6Pfafman, T. M., & McEwan, B. (2014). Polite women at work: Negotiating professional identity through strategic assertiveness. Women’s Studies in Communication, 37(2), 202–219.; Beinart, P. (2019, Feb. 7). Cory Book is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/what-cory-booker-can-learn-obama/582259/

7Hainmueller, J., Hopkins, D. J., & Yamamoto, T. (2014). Causal inference in conjoint analysis: Understanding multidimensional choices via stated preference experiments. Political Analysis, 22(1), 1–30; Knudsen, E., & Johannesson, M. P. (2019). Beyond the Limits of Survey Experiments: How Conjoint Designs Advance Causal Inference in Political Communication Research. Political Communication, 36, 259-271.

Author

• Ashley Muddiman, University of Kansas