(Im)Perfect Match: The Impact of Contradictions on the Evaluation of Politicians

• In Event: Candidate Qualities Effect on Perceived Qualifications & Evaluations

Abstract

In times of fake news and post-truth, political scientists have intensified the discussion about the role of information consumption in shaping political attitudes and guiding political behavior. The influence of information on electoral decisions is becoming increasingly relevant. The reasons for this lie both in the high information density of various media sources and in the decline of traditional party ties in society.

Contradictory information from different sources can create distrust among voters. One of the many reasons for this phenomenon is that the actual truth, if there is one, may rarely be clear or understandable to citizens, who usually rely on opinion leaders as their main source of information. Research shows that various mechanisms are employed to process contradictory information in a way that is consistent with one's beliefs. The impact of contradictory information on people's attitudes ultimately depends on these mechanisms.

With the decline of traditional party ties in society, political party candidates have also become an important factor explaining their party's electoral success. The personalization of politics has established itself as an evergreen research topic in recent decades. In particular, with the recurring phenomenon of successful populist parties around the world, research has focused intensively on candidate-centered politics and its impact on electoral success. It appears that we have different, but empirically confirmed, findings about information that influences candidate evaluations.

Since candidates and their parties are important information mediators and both actors are expected to be consistent with each other, it is particularly interesting to find out what effects contradictions between these actors have on the evaluation of candidates and their parties.
This study contributes to the ongoing research on the effects of information on the evaluation of political candidates and their parties in various ways. First, it examines via an experimental design which information is overall relevant for voters when they are free to choose among non-contradictory, contradictory, role-related and non-role related information about political candidates. Second, it can be examined how contradictions are processed and what effects contradictions ultimately have on the evaluation of parties and their candidates.

Theoretically, assuming congruence bias, contradictory information about a preferred candidate should have a positive effect on its evaluation and a negative effect on the evaluation of the opposing candidate. Negativity bias also leads to the assumption that the negative effect of contradictory information on candidate evaluation should be stronger than the positive effect of consistent information.

Although fictitious candidates are used, the contradictions used in the experiment are based on real phenomena of German politicians, such as their personal lives, their voting behavior in parliament, or their political statements. To check for manipulation, all information was pretested (German citizens recruited through an online panel provider, n=500) for whether it was perceived as contradictory or not and whether it concerned the personal or political role of the politician.

The online experiment among a representative sample of 2238 German citizens, also recruited through the online panel provider (Respondi), took place in May and June of 2022. After completing a questionnaire on political attitudes, the respondents were divided in different experimental and control groups (15 pairs of two politicians of 6 different parties). On an information selection board, the respondents could select contradictory and non-contradictory, role related and non-role related headlines about two politicians, leading to the associated information.

After the information selection task, the respondents evaluated the politicians regarding different personality traits such as assertiveness, competence, morality and warmth as well as on party compatibility and an overall feeling thermometer.

First findings of t-tests, Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank testes for mean value differences and linear regressions show that the selection of contradictory information weakens the perceived party compatibility of the regarding candidate. Self-assessed personality traits of the respondents also show effects. The warmer respondents consider themselves to be, the more likely they seem to ignore contradictions regarding left-wing parties. On the other hand, the more moral respondents consider themselves to be, the more serious they seem to weigh contradictions regarding left-wing parties.

Further analysis on possible differential effects of role-related and non-role-related information will be conducted. Methodologically, the order of information selection (sequence analysis) is considered as well as the extent of information processing, measured via recall questions about the information.

Author

• Tatjana Nicole Brütting, Zeppelin Universität