How Do Voters Perceive Disabled Candidates?

Abstract

In order to form an impression of the traits, views, and competencies of election candidates, voters often draw on existing stereotypes about their identities and characteristics, such as their gender or ethnicity. Meanwhile, although there is a strong stigma associated with disability in our societies, we know very little about how voters perceive candidates with disabilities. This study uses a survey experiment with a conjoint design conducted in Britain to examine the effects of candidate disability on voter perceptions of their personality traits, beliefs, and issue competencies. Contrary to common stereotypes, physically disabled candidates are not seen as incompetent and weak. Instead, they are perceived as more compassionate, honest, and hard-working than nondisabled candidates, although the effects are modest in size. They are also assumed to be further to the left ideologically and more concerned about and competent in dealing with policy on healthcare, minority rights, and social welfare. The study enriches our understanding of the role of disability in electoral behavior and political representation while also providing valuable—and overall encouraging—insights for disabled (aspiring) politicians and political parties.

Do political duos diminish discriminatory voter preferences? Evidence from a combined conjoint experiment

“…5 The (dis)advantage experienced by political candidates from other traditionally excluded groups has recently received attention. Despite optimistic results for some of these groups (Carnes and Lupu, 2016; Reher, 2021), the reality is less positive for candidates belonging to ethnic, sexual and gender minorities (Everitt and Horvath, 2021; Magni and Reynolds, 2021; Martin and Blinder, 2020; Portmann and Stojanović, 2021). Magni and Reynolds (2021) find that lesbians, gays and especially transgender candidates suffer an electoral penalty in three experiments in the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand.…”

The new corruption crusaders: Security sector ties as an anti-corruption voting heuristic

“…Given the complexity of policy issues in the modern era, many voters have neither the time nor the inclination to make choices fully informed by candidate positions on substantive issues (Downs 1957;Palfrey and Poole 1987). Instead, voters frequently rely on heuristics, such as party (Rahn 1993), gender (Krupnikov et al 2016), race (Weaver 2012), age (Webster and Pierce 2019), religion (Calfano and Djupe 2009), disability (Reher 2021), appearance (Ahler et al 2017), and even ostensibly nonpolitical cultural images (Hiaeshutter-Rice et al 2021) to get an idea of which candidates generally align most closely with their worldviews. While generally thought of as imperfect shortcuts for low-information voters, heuristics contain important information for voters and are helpful for organizing electoral competition.…”

Seeing is (not) voting: Examining the Influence of Visual Cues on Voter Preferences with Visual Conjoint

“…These experiments typically use text labels to describe the candidates' most relevant social categories with direct descriptions. While this text method has been widely used to study voter prejudice related to age, gender, ethnicity and educational level, it has recently expanded to include other social categories such as sexual orientation, disability, or HIV status (Magni andReynolds 2021a, 2021b;Reher 2021).…”