Choosing the Right Candidate: Observational and Experimental Evidence that Conservatives and Liberals Prefer Powerful and Warm Candidate Personalities,Respectively

A comprehensive literature relates voters’ electoral decisions to their perceptions of candidates’ personalities. Yet the mechanisms through which voters are attracted to certain candidates and not to others remain largely unresolved. To answer this question, this article integrates two recent interdisciplinary insights. First, leader and candidate preferences are found to be strongly dependent on levels of contextual conflict. Second, individual differences in political ideology are shown to be rooted in psychological orientations leading conservatives and liberals to perceive society in fundamentally different ways: Conservatives tend to perceive the social world as dangerous and threatening, whereas liberals to a larger degree see society as a safe place characterized by cooperation. Based on this, it is predicted that conservatives and liberals will also prefer different candidate personalities. Specifically, conservatives are predicted to value candidate power and “strong leadership” more than liberals, whereas liberals are predicted to value candidate warmth more than conservatives. The prediction is supported observationally using the 1984–2008 American National Election Studies and experimentally in two original experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. Consequences and scope conditions for trait-based voting are discussed.     

Decomposing the Relationship Between Candidates’ Facial Appearance and Electoral Success

Numerous studies show that candidates’ facial competence predicts electoral success. However, a handful of other studies suggest that candidates’ attractiveness is a stronger predictor of electoral success than facial competence. Furthermore, the overall relationship between inferences from candidates’ faces and electoral success is challenged in two ways: (i) non-facial factors in candidate photos such as clothing and hair style as well as (ii) parties’ nomination strategies are suggested as potential confounds. This study is based on original data about all 268 candidates running in three local elections in 2009 in Denmark and supports a two-component structure of the relationship between candidates’ facial appearance and their electoral success. Facial competence is found to mediate a positive relationship between candidates’ attractiveness and electoral success, but simultaneously facial competence also predicts electoral success over and above what can be accounted for by attractiveness. Importantly these relationships are found when seven different non-facial factors, parties’ nomination strategies and candidates’ age and gender are controlled for. This suggests that the two-component structure of the relationship between candidates’ facial appearance and electoral success is highly robust.     

Failing Political Representation or a Change in Kind? Models of Representation and Empirical Trends in Europe

This article reviews Peter Mair’s argument on the failure of political parties and the subsequent failure of representative democracy in Europe. It develops a conceptual framework to test the validity of Mair’s argument against competing interpretations of the development of representative democracy. It identifies three ideal typical models of representative democracy that seem to have succeeded each other over time: cleavage-based democracy, competitive democracy, and audience democracy. The article proposes specific empirical hypotheses for political parties and voters in each of these periods and provides empirical evidence to test the validity of these hypotheses. It concludes with a discussion of the results, evaluating whether the changes that occurred indicate failure of representative democracy or rather the emergence of a different form of representative democracy.     

The European Elections Study 1994

European Journal of Political Research -     

Real and perceived effects of changing the grant system from specific to general grants

The paper is based on a study of the 1993 Finnish grant reform, changing from a system with earmarked matching grants to a system with general, non-matching grants. The analysis of cross-sectional data confirms the “fly-paper effect” and also that matching grants have a stronger stimulating effect than non-matching grants on local expenditure. The fly-paper effect is then modified to take account of the distribution of power inside local government. The change to general grants without central government supervision might mean more power to the central management in the local government and a diminished power for sector officers and groups dependent on the sector services. Perceptions of principal actors in the local government budget process were that the reform changed the distribution of power, in some municipalities to the disadvantage of locally small weak groups that could benefit under the old system of earmarked matching grants.     

Winning Faces Vary by Ideology: How Nonverbal Source Cues Influence Election and Communication Success in Politics

Not just the content of a communication but also the source of the communication shapes its persuasiveness. Recent research in political communication suggests that important source cues are nonverbal and relate to the physical traits of the source such that attractive- and competent-looking sources have better success in attracting votes and policy support. Yet, are all nonverbal source cues similarly received irrespective of audience, or does their reception vary across audiences? Specifically, we ask whether some physical traits are received positively by some audiences but backfire for others. Utilizing research on ideological stereotypes and the determinants of facial preferences, we focus on the relationship between the facial dominance of the source and the ideology of the receiver. Across five studies, we demonstrate that a dominant face is a winning face when the audience is conservative but backfires and decreases success when the audience is liberal. On the other hand, a non-dominant face constitutes a winning face among liberal audiences but backfires among conservatives. These effects seemingly stem from deep-seated psychological responses and shape both the election and communication success of real-world politicians. If the faces of politicians do not match the ideology of their constituency, they are more likely to lose in the competition for votes and policy support.     

Challenges for Effective Counterterrorism Communication: Practitioner Insights and Policy Implications for Preventing Radicalization,Disrupting Attack Planning,and Mitigating Terrorist Attacks

Growing concerns about small-scale, low sophistication terrorist attacks, and the difficulties they present for security services, make public coproduction of security increasingly necessary. Communication to ensure that the public(s) is aware of the role they can play will be central to this. This article, based on interviews with thirty expert practitioners, explores challenges associated with communication designed to prevent radicalization, interdict attack planning and mitigate the impacts of a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom and Denmark. The interplay between these challenges and the contemporary terrorist context are analyzed, highlighting that new, or adapted, communications and approaches may be necessary.