There has been extensive research into the extent to which voters utilise short cuts based on gender and race stereotypes when evaluating candidates, but relatively little is known about how they respond to other background characteristics.We compare the impact of candidates' sex, religion, age, education, occupation and location/residence through a survey experiment in which respondents rate two candidates based on short biographies. We find small differences in the ratings of candidates in response to sex, religion, age and education cues but more sizeable effects are apparent for the candidate's occupation and place of residence. Even once we introduce a control for political party into our experimental scenarios the effect of candidate's place of residence continues to have a sizeable impact on candidate evaluations. Our research suggests that students of electoral behaviour should pay attention to a wider range of candidate cues. Keywords: candidate evaluations; candidate traits; survey experimentsWe know relatively little about what socio-demographic characteristics voters value in election candidates -and the extent to which short cuts based on stereotypes matter when it comes to the way candidates are viewed by voters.The literature on candidate effects is large, but it is also partial and geographically skewed. There is a voluminous and sophisticated literature looking at some types of candidate characteristic, of which by far the most common are biological sex and race. But other characteristics are much less studied, and the majority of the literature draws on data from one country, the United States.

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. We discuss how our findings apply to other contexts in more detail in the conclusion. 16 We begin the article by outlining the mechanisms through which dissent may affect voter evaluations of their representative. We then present the results from our three studies, beginning with the observational data before moving on to the experimental studies. We conclude by considering the broader implications of our findings. Theory and expectationsDrawing on existing literature, we consider three mechanisms through which dissent may affect constituent evaluations of their legislative representative. Dissent could: (1) Profile effectsThe profile effects hypothesis, suggested as one possible mechanism by Kam, contends that dissenting legislators receive electoral benefits due to their enhanced media profile. 17 This increases their name recognition, which in turn leads to greater constituent approval and more support at the polls, for example via the recognition heuristic. 18 If any increased electoral success of dissenting legislators is wholly the result of such effects, then constituents do not in fact react to independentmindedness directly at all. 19 Conditional evaluationsIn contrast, conditional evaluation accounts posit that dissent can have a direct impact on voter evaluations of a legislator, but that the nature of this effect depends on the nature and context of the dissent and on the particular preferences of the voter. The predictions regarding voters who identify with a party other than that of their MP ('opposing partisans') are more ambiguous: these voters may be indifferent to dissent from their MP, or may even have particularly positive evaluations of dissent, inasmuch as it damages the brand of a party that competes with their own. Finally, non-partisans may also react particularly positively to dissent, if many such voters have a general dislike for partisan politics. 22Such partisan assessments of dissent need to be distinguished from a subtly different type of conditionality which also relates to voter partisanship, and which we label partisan crowding out.This refers to Kam's argument that when voters with strong partisan attachments come to evaluate an individual politician, party-related considerations (including the party affiliation of that politician) tend to dominate so that there is little or no room left for any other information about the politician -such as their dissent behaviour -to have any impact. 23 In contrast, the individual attributes of a politician ...

The 1997 British general election saw a record 120 women returned to the House of Commons, 101 of them Labour. Yet if the most striking feature of the 1997 intake into the House of Commons was the number of newly elected women, then the most striking feature of the backbench rebellions in that parliament was the lack of these women amongst the ranks of the rebels. They were less than half as likely to rebel against the party whip as the rest of the Parliamentary Labour Party; even those who did, did so around half as often. Attempts to explain this difference fall into two broad groups: (i) those that attempt to explain the difference away, as resulting from other characteristics of the women, and (ii) those that attempt to explain it -indeed, celebrate it -as evidence of a different, women's, style of political behaviour. Attempts at (i) are largely unconvincing: most of the supposed explanations for the difference do not stand up to empirical verification. Although difficult to prove, a belief in (ii) is dominant amongst the new women themselves.

This article provides an empirical analysis of voting behaviour in the second ballot of the 1990 Conservative leadership contest that resulted in John Major becoming party leader and prime minister. Seven hypotheses of voting behaviour are generated from the extant literature relating voting to socio-economic variables (occupational and educational background), political variables (parliamentary experience, career status, age and electoral marginality) and ideological variables (drawn from survey data on MPs' positions on economic, European and moral issues). These hypotheses are tested using data on voting intentions gathered from published lists of MPs' declarations, interviews with each of the leadership campaign teams, and correspondence with MPs. Bivariate relationships are presented, followed by logistic regression analysis to isolate the unique impact that each variable had on voting. This shows that educational background, parliamentary experience and (especially) attitudes to Europe were the key factors determining voting. The importance of Europe in the contest is particularly instructive: the severe problems for Major's leadership which were caused by the issue can be attributed to, and understood in the context of, the 1990 contest in which he became leader.

The case for greater descriptive representation of groups such as women and ethnic minorities has become widely, though not wholly, accepted in much of the academic literature and in the ‘real world’ of politics in most advanced democracies. In the UK the goal of greater descriptive representation of women has often become framed as a zero‐sum game against men, especially local men, with consequences for the descriptive representation of women. This article examines whether claims made for the descriptive representation of women and black candidates can and should apply to local candidates, whatever their sex or race. It draws a distinction between the representation of a territory (common to most representative systems) and the representation of a territory by someone from that territory, a similar distinction to the difference common in the gender and politics literature between the representation of women by an elected representative and the representation of women by women representatives. The article also distinguishes between a hard and a soft form of this argument. The latter applies to almost every constituency in the UK, but it is a claim not based on arguments for the presence of the disadvantaged. However, the case for a local candidate to represent a more disadvantaged constituency, the harder form of the argument, can be made on almost all of the criteria applied to other excluded groups identified in the politics of presence literature.