Candidate Disability and Electoral Messaging

• In Event: Pushing Barriers: The Place of Disability in Politics and Political Science Mini-Conference: Disabled Political Candidates: Navigating Identity, Messaging & Voter Response

Abstract

Candidates with disabilities often face distinct challenges in election campaigns. Longtime political observers will recall the 1972 withdrawal of Senator Tom Eagleton from the Democratic Presidential ticket due to media disclosures of his prior hospitalization for depression. More recently, Senator John Fetterman faced media scrutiny and opponent attacks due to lingering effects of a stroke. In this paper, we will examine the impact of disability on voter choice, identify in which candidates and for which voter populations disability is likely to have the greatest impact on candidate selection, and assess the effectiveness of different types of messaging designed to mitigate disability bias on the part of the voting public.

Utilizing a Lucid sample of respondents weighted to be nationally representative, we will conduct a two-part experiment to analyze the impact of candidate disability and different messaging strategies for mitigating disability bias. In the first component of our study, we will conduct a conjoint experiment testing a broad range of physical and mental disabilities on the public’s likelihood of voting for a candidate for the US Senate. These include stroke, bipolar disorder, autism, paralysis, blindness, epilepsy, and others. We will also randomize whether the election is in a primary or general election context. In addition to vote choice, we will also test perceptions of candidate ideology in specific issue domains, both generally and within specific issue areas. Each choice set presented to respondents will include a candidate with a disability and a candidate without a disability.Other candidate characteristics (i.e: race/ethnicity, gender, issue positions) will be randomized. Drawing on Reher (2021), we hypothesize that candidate’s disabilities will result in a perception that disabled candidates are more left-wing than comparable non-disabled candidates, particularly in areas related to healthcare and welfare spending. If correct, this may mean that candidate disability’s impact on vote choice will be positive in certain contexts and negative in others. Prior work regarding candidate gender from Ono & Burden (2019) finds that gender bias is strongest among independent voters, as party affiliation drives decision-making among partisan voters. Hypothesizing that these same dynamics apply in the context of disability, we predict that disability bias will be stronger among independent voters than among partisan voters and in primary contexts as opposed to general election ones.

In the second component of our experiment, we intend to test different combinations of messaging frames regarding candidate disabilities to assess their effectiveness both individually and in response to specific counter-arguments. Respondents will be presented with one messaging frame from each candidate after they complete their initial conjoint task, then asked to provide new answers regarding vote choice and perceptions of candidate ideology after seeing the messaging frames. Specifically, we will test messaging frames in the forms of tweets from from opposing candidates, with frames from non-disabled candidates intended to exacerbate disability bias and frames from disabled candidates intended to mitigate it. Exacerbating conditions will include frames relating to candidate competence, calls for health transparency, and attempts to highlight the non-disabled candidates superior health without direct reference to opponent. Mitigating frames will include invocation of others with a specific condition, accusations of disability bias, and assertion that experience with a given condition provides a disabled candidate with greater empathy to their constituents’ needs.

In addition to testing the impact of specific diagnoses, we will also test for intersectional effects on both a demographic basis (i.e.: does a disability impact female or minority candidates differently than it does male or white candidates) and an ideological basis (i.e.: do voters perceive disability differently depending on if they are more left- or right-wing). Finally, we test for differences based on voter characteristics, evaluating if disability has a different impact on voter preferences based on voter demographics, ideology and partisanship.

Authors

• Ari Neeman, Harvard University

• Timothy Herbert Callaghan, Boston University