Do we need warm leaders? Exploratory study of the role of voter evaluations of leaders’ traits on turnout in seven European countries

Previous research on leader effects has focused exclusively on the impact of voters’ evaluations of leaders on vote choice, disregarding possible effects on the prior step of deciding whether or not to turn out to vote. In line with the personalisation of politics thesis, leaders have a higher impact among dealigned voters. Previous studies have demonstrated that leader effects are stronger among voters who voice their dealignment – namely party switchers. However, the potential impact of leaders among those who exited (i.e., who have abstained) is still unstudied. Could leaders have a mobilisation effect and therefore trigger turnout decisions? What characteristics of party leaders are more relevant in this regard? This article is the first comparative study to examine how the evaluation of party leaders’ traits influences voter turnout in general elections. The work incorporates data from election studies across seven countries with different social contexts (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Hungary). Characteristics of leaders were grouped into two dimensions – competence and warmth – in accordance with the stereotype content model and relevant studies on leaders’ traits evaluation. Multiple binary logistic regression models were performed to analyse the predictive power of competence and warmth on turnout, controlling for sociodemographic, political ideology variables and voters’ past political behaviour. Results reinforce the personalisation of politics theory, showing the utmost relevance of warmth personality traits of leaders in voter turnout decisions. Competence personality traits were found to be relevant only in some situations. Interaction effects were also demonstrated between warmth evaluations and identifying with a right-wing party as well as past political behaviour with both warmth and competence.     

The Impact of Voter Evaluations of Leaders’ Traits on Voting Behaviour: Evidence from Seven European Countries

This article aims to examine how the evaluation of party leaders’ traits influences voting behaviour. The work incorporates data from election studies across seven countries with different social contexts (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, Italy and Hungary). Characteristics of leaders were placed into two groups: competence and warmth, in accordance with the stereotype content model and relevant studies on evaluations of leaders’ traits. Since different personality traits were evaluated within each country, the analysis was based on the two aforementioned dimensions and the political ideology of the leader. Multiple sequential binary logistic regression models were performed to analyse the predictive power of competence and warmth on voting behaviour, controlling for socio-demographic and political ideology variables of voters. Results reinforce the personalisation of politics theory, showing the relevance of leaders’ warm personality traits. As for the competence dimension, it was proven to be decisive only with regard to left-wing party leaders.     

Gender Differences in Assessments of Party Leaders

Is there a relationship between party leader gender and voters' assessments? The answer is ‘yes’ according to theses on gender identity and stereotyping. A voter survey during the 2011 Danish general election allows for a comprehensive analysis of a less likely case with four male and four female party leaders. Female party leaders are assessed more positively by female voters than male voters both in regard to general party leader sympathy and assessment of specific characteristics, whereas it is not the case that male party leaders are assessed more positively by male voters than female voters. The impact of gender does not increase with age; in fact, the opposite is the case among men since younger male voters have less sympathy for female party leaders. Furthermore, there is no support for the expectation that voters with more education or with higher levels of political interest and knowledge are more positive towards party leaders of their own gender than voters with less education. Also, the relationship between gender and voter assessment is not stronger prior to an election campaign than immediately after an election. Hence, in sum, gender identity does not seem to require a higher level of political sophistication, nor does it decrease with higher levels of information.     

Human Branding in Political Marketing: Applying Contemporary Branding Thought to Political Parties and Their Leaders

Political marketing advances by engaging with new and advanced concepts from both of its parent disciplines. One of the most recent fields of brand research—the study of the human brand—is taken into the political marketing arena in this essay. Human branding is an emergent topic in mainstream marketing. The value as a brand of a person who is well-known and subject to explicit marketing communications efforts is being investigated in many fields. The concept has clear prima facie value in political marketing, where the role of a political leader as part of the political marketing offer has been recognized extensively. Politics is also a unique context given the relationship between leaders and parties, each of which has some unique brand associations. The process of exploring the application of human branding in politics also provides a context in which some of the interactions among party and leader, human brand, and organizational brand can be explored and further developed. Among the conclusions are that political party leaders require brand authenticity as an advocate of the party policy platform and brand authority to command the organization and deliver on the policies being advocated. Implications for party and campaign management are outlined.     

Credibility Enacted: Understanding the Meaning of Credible Political Leadership in the Dutch Parliamentary Election Campaign of 2010

In times of perception politics, the credibility of electoral candidates is a crucial asset in political marketing. This raises the question to which political leaders citizens attribute credibility and how political credibility is gained and lost through media performance. We analyze and compare two contrasting cases during the Dutch parliamentary election campaign of 2010. Whereas in this campaign Mark Rutte—leader of the liberal party VVD—gained credibility, the credibility of Job Cohen—at the time, leader of the social-democratic PvdA—waned substantially. To understand this we extend the source credibility approach with a dramaturgical approach, and as such we shed light on what happens in the dynamic, interactive process between leaders and audiences in which credibility is constructed.     

Leader heuristics,political knowledge and voting in Britain's AV referendum

This paper uses data gathered in the British Election Study's 2011 AV Referendum Survey to investigate the impact of party leader images on referendum voting. The emphasis on leader images accords well with research showing that leader heuristics have sizable effects on voting in major referendums and general elections in Britain and other mature democracies. Reacting to these findings, some analysts have argued that the effects of leader images are heterogeneous, being stronger for voters with lower levels of political knowledge. In contrast, consistent with recent research in experimental economics and political psychology, it can be hypothesized that more knowledgeable voters rely more heavily on leader heuristics than do less knowledgeable individuals. Using multivariate statistical techniques developed for interpreting interaction effects in nonlinear models, analyses indicate that a political knowledge index focusing on the electoral system does not have statistically significant effects on referendum voting. However, voters' knowledge of leaders' positions on AV does interact with leader images. The analyses show that voters with higher levels of political knowledge are influenced more strongly by leader heuristics than are those who are less knowledgeable.     

Advocating social marketing as ultimate weapon to fighting HIV/AIDS propagation,and related discrimination and stigmatisation

The spreading of HIV/AIDS in the African continent and related discrimination and stigmatisation towards people living with the virus have become a major issue to be addressed by communities, health organisations and governments in Africa. An effective way to successfully overcome these plagues necessitates the application of social marketing techniques and campaigns. However, when it comes to funding and supporting social marketing activities, African leaders deny the important role that the government could play in achieving the ‘HIV/AIDS free generation goal’ as well as making African societies a non‐discriminative and stigmatisation places for infected people. The present study intend to demonstrate through analysis of empirical data that social marketing is crucial in changing people's sexual behaviour and battling misconceptions that lead to discrimination and stigmatisation of infected people. In this light, African political authorities such as Congolese leaders need to understand the relevancy of this discipline in their HIV/AIDS policy.     

The Marriage of Politics and Marketing

Research into major party behaviour in Britain from a political marketing perspective finds that political marketing is broad in scope and offers fresh analytical tools to explain how political organizations behave. It is nevertheless a marriage between political science and marketing. It borrows the core marketing concepts of product, sales and market-orientation, and techniques such as market intelligence, and adapts them to suit traditional tenets of political science to produce an integrated theoretical framework. A party that takes a product-orientation argues for what it stands for and believes in. A Sales-Orientated party focuses on selling its argument and product to voters. A Market-Orientated party designs its behaviour to provide voter satisfaction. Exploring these three orientations demonstrates that political marketing can be applied to a wide range of behaviour and suggests its potential to be applied to several areas of political studies.     

Style issues and vote choice

It has been an assumption common in voting research that candidates must offer and voters must perceive opposing stands on issues for those issues to have a rational influence on the vote. Though apparently reasonable, this assumption eliminates analysis of the rational impact of style in voter thinking. This article argues that style issues should not be so easily dismissed and were of some importance in the 1972 presidential election. First, the data indicate that voters considered style issues as important as position issues. Second, voters were able to detect differences between the candidates on certain style issues. Third, salient style issues and salient position issues are similar in their causal relationship to the vote. These findings lend support to the general conclusion that style issues are an important and rational element of voter deliberations and have several implications for the study of public opinion, the behavior of political leaders, and the adequacy of elections as mechanisms of governmental accountability.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association in Phoenix, March 31-April 2, 1977. The data presented here were gathered under National Science Foundation Grant GS-35408, Robert D. McClure and Thomas E. Patterson, principle investigators. We would like to thank Professor Patterson and McClure for the use of their data and their helpful comments.     

Prime ministers in the age of austerity: an increase in the personalisation of voting behaviour

This article tests the personalisation thesis in Portugal (2002–2015), as well as its causes, focusing on changes in the level of party identification and perceptions of the economy. Portugal is an interesting example given its recent experience of a harsh economic crisis, as well as a decline in party identification. Results confirm a growing exogenous impact of leader evaluations on voting over the period but not in a linear fashion. During the crisis, the growing trend of leader effects for the incumbent party continues for those voters who have a positive perception of the economy. Conversely, for the main opposition party, leader effects are greater for those who perceive the economy as being worse. Thus the crisis operates as a catalyst for leader effects. The impact of leaders is also greater among the de-aligned, the numbers of which rise considerably during the period under analysis. It is voters with no party identification, who use leaders as proxies to a greater extent. These conclusions may extend to further studies on leader effects in Western democracies and help to shed light on the process through which leaders are becoming more relevant in voting decisions.     

Social Media and the Paradox of Fear: An Exploratory Study of Political Relationship Marketing Within South Wales

This paper explores the key challenges of social media use by politicians in relation to political relationship marketing. Utilising a case study of the online footprint left by Welsh politicians and their attitude towards social media based on three business based rationales – engagement, level of control, and return on investment – the paper offers an expanded conception of the perceptions and fears influencing the use of social media by politicians in terms of political relationship marketing. The article concludes with some critical thoughts regarding the understanding of relationship marketing principles by politicians.     

Is there a friends-and-neighbors effect for party leaders?

The friends-and-neighbors effect, which refers to voters' tendency to support politicians near hometown areas, has not yet been tested systematically for party leaders. Linking a built-for-purpose dataset on 266 leaders to a sample of 380,208 voters from 50 country elections in 19 parliamentary democracies drawn from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) project, this article examines the effect of party leaders' local proximity on voters' leader evaluations and voting intentions. I hypothesize that leaders receive more positive evaluations and electoral support from voters in the district where they run for election. The results show that shared district increases voters' sympathy for leaders and their inclination to vote for the party of ‘near’ leaders. While the location of party leaders affects voters in all electoral systems, I find that the friends-and-neighbors effect on leader evaluations and party vote choice is stronger in systems with personalized, preferential and combined ballots.     

Personalized politics: Evidence from the Czech and Slovak Republics

What role do political party leaders play in individual vote choice? Recent literature argues that leaders are increasingly important for decisions at the ballot box. Moreover, scholars suggest leaders may be particularly consequential in volatile, under-institutionalized party systems, like those of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Accordingly, we investigate the extent to which leader evaluations matter for individual voting decisions, and whether these evaluations are more consequential than ideological proximities between voters and parties. We also explore whether leaders matter more for leader-centered, ideologically blurry, and populist parties. Through a comparison of the 2017 Czech and 2020 Slovak elections, we find that leader evaluations are strongly associated with voting decisions and that these evaluations tend to be more consequential than ideological proximity. We also show that leaders are more important for parties with strong “brands” – those that have most differentiated themselves from their competitors.     

International political marketing: a case study of United States soft power and public diplomacy

• Political marketing can be categorized with three aspects: the election campaign as the origin of political marketing, the permanent campaign as a governing tool and international political marketing (IPM) which covers the areas of public diplomacy, marketing of nations, international political communication, national image, soft power and the cross‐cultural studies of political marketing. IPM and the application of soft power have been practiced by nation‐states throughout the modern history of international relations starting with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nation‐states promote the image of their country worldwide through public diplomacy, exchange mutual interests in their bilateral or multilateral relation with other countries, lobby for their national interests in international organizations and apply cultural and political communication strategies internationally to build up their soft power. In modern international relations, nation‐states achieve their foreign policy goals by applying both hard power and soft power. Public diplomacy as part of IPM is a method in the creation of soft power, as well as, in the application of soft power.
• This paper starts with the definitional and conceptual review of political marketing. For the first time in publication, it establishes a theoretical model which provides a framework of the three aspects of political marketing, that is electoral political marketing (EPM), governmental political marketing (GPM) and IPM. This model covers all the main political exchanges among six inter‐related components in the three pairs of political exchange process, that is candidates and party versus voters and interest groups in EPM ; governments, leaders and public servants versus citizens and interest groups in GPM, including political public relations and lobbying which have been categorized as the third aspect of political marketing in some related studies; and governments, interest group and activists versus international organizations and foreign subjects in IPM. This study further develops a model of IPM, which covers its strategy and marketing mix on the secondary level of the general political marketing model, and then, the third level model of international political choice behaviour based the theory of political choice behaviour in EPM. This paper continues to review the concepts of soft power and public diplomacy and defines their relation with IPM.
• It then reports a case study on the soft power and public diplomacy of the United States from the perspectives of applying IPM and soft power. Under the framework of IPM, it looks at the traditional principles of US foreign policy, that is Hamiltonians, Wilsonians, Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, and the application of US soft power in the Iraq War since 2003. The paper advances the argument that generally all nation states apply IPM to increase their soft power. The decline of US soft power is caused mainly by its foreign policy. The unilateralism Jacksonians and realism Hamiltonians have a historical trend to emphasize hard power while neglecting soft power. Numerous reports and studies have been conducted on the pros and cons of US foreign policy in the Iraq War, which are not the focus of this paper. From the aspect of IPM, this paper studies the case of US soft power and public diplomacy, and their effects in the Iraq War. It attempts to exam the application of US public diplomacy with the key concept of political exchange, political choice behaviour, the long‐term approach and the non‐government operation principles of public diplomacy which is a part of IPM. The case study confirms the relations among IPM, soft power and public diplomacy and finds that lessons can be learned from these practices of IPM. The paper concludes that there is a great demand for research both at a theoretical as well as practical level for IPM and soft power. It calls for further study on this subject.

Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perception of societal influence among civil society leaders – an elite perspective

ABSTRACT

This article explores the perception of societal influence of civil society leaders based on a survey study conducted in 2017 among leaders of Swedish civil society organizations. Civil society leaders represent organizations that are often based on and guided by religious, political, or cultural values and that often strive to achieve some sort of social change. To exercise influence on society is thus a crucial feature of civil society leaders. Drawing on elite theories, the article seeks to explain differences in the perception of influence by looking at the following factors: (1) personal qualities and resources such as age, gender, country of birth, education, and working experiences, (2) social networks and contacts with representatives of different institutions (media, government, etc.), and (3) organizational position and resources, including relations with public authorities. The analysis shows that two out of three surveyed leaders perceive they have great influence in society concerning the issues they work with. Among the factors explaining the perception of influence, we find being a leader of an organization at the regional level, being of older age, having leading representatives of the media in one’s personal network, and stating that one has great influence over the organization one leads.     

Symbolic Political Communication,and Trust: A Young Voters’ Perspective of the Indonesian Presidential Election

Communication in political marketing plays an important role in political mobilization, building trust both in political actors and the government. Politicians construct their messages through careful branding as the power of the cultural symbols and signs conveyed through the brand are potent heuristic devices. This is particularly important in emerging democracies, where there is limited political knowledge and understanding. Therefore, this research explores how young voters understand the symbolic communication fashioned by political actors in Indonesia and how it relates to their brand. Indonesia is an interesting area for study; it is both secular and the world’s largest Muslim democracy. Using a phenomenological approach, a total of 19 in-depth interviews with young voters were conducted to gain rich insight into perceptions of the complexity of political symbolism, and trust among young voters. This study conceptualized political communication as a dual approach. The political brand promise is intrinsically linked to cultural references and conveyed through symbolic communication combined with a distinctive brand message. This builds trust, which then affects political participation. This conceptual framework provides insights into the importance of culture in branding which has implications for policy makers and actors in emerging and established democracies.     

Do local leaders know their voters? A test of guessability in India

Prominent theories of clientelism—the exchange of benefits for political support—depend on the assumption that politicians, through local agents immersed in local social networks, possess detailed information on voters’ political preferences prior to targeting. This article provides the first direct test of this assumption. It develops a behavioral measure, guessability, which gauges the ability of elected village leaders, who often function as brokers and prominent vote mobilizers, to correctly identify the partisan vote intentions of voters in their locality. It then develops a method to estimate added informational value, which compares the performance of local leaders to low-information benchmarks that capture guessability rates that can feasibly be achieved by outsiders. Original data from surveys of voters and elected village politicians across 96 village councils in Rajasthan, India indicate that while these village leaders out-perform low-information benchmarks with respect to co-partisans, they perform no better than this baseline vis-à-vis non-co-partisans.     

Elite perceptions of mass preferences in The Netherlands; biases in cognitive responsiveness

Abstract. Several studies have shown dissimilarities between political leaders and voters in terms of political attitudes and policy preferences. Though many explanations have been offered for this phenomenon, the knowledge factor has been overlooked. The basic question of this paper is how knowledgeable politicians are of the political opinions of their voters as well as of the general public. Forty-six national Dutch politicians were asked to estimate the percentage of the public at large and of their own voters who agree with specific political statements. These estimates were then compared with the actual distribution of opinions. Though using a rather strict criterion it has been found that politicians tend to give inaccurate estimates of the public's support for various political issues. The inaccuracy does not differ between members of the government and members of parliament, but politicians of parties in office appear to perform worse than members of opposition parties. The data do not support the hypothesis about politicians' ability to correctly estimate majority and minority opinions, or to accurately localize their own voters relative to the public at large. Furthermore it is observed that politicians overestimate rather than underestimate differences in opinion between the electorate and their own voters. No difference is found in politicians'estimates of political issues which can or cannot be classified in terms of 'left' or 'right'. In addition, politicians do not judge their voters to be more right-wing than they actually are. Contrary to our hypothesis, Social-Democratic politicians are not more likely to show a 'conservative bias' in estimating their voters' preferences compared to politicians from the Christian-Democratic and Liberal parties. Finally, the relevance of our findings for political sciences as well as some normative consequences are briefly discussed.     

Reconsidering Nordic Party Space1

The erosion of the social and economic bases underlying traditional party systems has led analysts to search for new cleavage structures undergirding the present party systems. Meanwhile, analysts have identified a range of issue dimensions that also bear on voters’ party preferences. This article studies the degree to which grid-group theory's four political biases of hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism can make inroads into the left–right dimension's stronghold in accounting for voters’ party preference. The analysis draws on a 1999 survey in the five Nordic countries (N= 4,832). The method combines voters’ party preferences with their scores on issue dimensions, or political dimensions. Analyses show that conventional party families, with one exception, are not identified along any of the five political orientations. Only the five conservative parties are exclusively identified as a party family on the left–right dimension. Party preference is more closely associated with the left–right dimension than the political biases. Sweden has the purest and simplest party cleavage, whereas Denmark has the most composite one. Across the Nordic countries, the green party family is most dissimilar, whereas the progress siblings are most alike. The left–right dimension accounts well for differences between parties within polities, whereas political biases, and egalitarianism in particular, account well for differences between parties of similar origin across polities.