The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity

Laustsen, Lasse; Bor, Alexander

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2017.08.001

Cited by 70 publications

(64 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Scholars seem to agree that warmth and competence are the two main dimensions along which humans assess one another's traits (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick ; Laustsen and Bor ; Wojciszke, Bazinska, and Jaworski ). Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick (, 77) highlight that “the warmth dimension captures traits that are related to perceived intent, including friendliness, helpfulness, sincerity, trustworthiness and morality, whereas the competence dimension reflects traits that are related to perceived ability, including intelligence, skill, creativity and efficacy.” In other words, the warmth dimension encompasses how someone judges another person's intentions , and the competence dimension concerns how a person's ability is judged.…”

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Social psychologists argue—based on evolutionary pressures—that social perceptions are based, first, on whether someone has good intentions or not (i.e., the warmth dimension) and, second, on whether someone can behave according to intentions (i.e., the competence dimension) (Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick ). Political scientists argue—using the relevancy of tasks—for the exact same opposite dominance, since citizens evaluate candidates based on whether they are competent enough to fulfill their political tasks before evaluating their warmth (Funk ; Laustsen and Bor ).…”

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Before the actual implications of citizens assessments of bureaucrats can be investigated, however, we need understand how citizens perceive different types of bureaucrats. Both social psychology and political science have long traditions of understanding how humans assess each other in terms of the traits of warmth and competence (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, and Glick ; Laustsen and Bor ; Wojciszke, Bazinska, and Jaworski ). This article draws on this trait assessment literature and investigates how citizens assess street‐level bureaucrats with different core tasks in terms of their warmth and competence.…”

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confidence: 99%

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How Do Citizens Assess Street‐Level Bureaucrats’ Warmth and Competence? A Typology and Test

Boer

2020

Public Administration Review

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Citizens encounter many street‐level bureaucrats in their lifetime. How do they assess the traits of the bureaucrats they meet? Understanding citizens’ assessments of bureaucrats is important, because citizens are not passive receivers of policies. This article explores citizens’ classifications of street‐level bureaucrats based on their core task. Using a factorial survey (n = 580), three clusters of bureaucrats are identified: those who are regulation oriented, those who are service oriented, and those who are both regulation and service oriented. Then, the article tests how these three types of bureaucrats are assessed on warmth and competence and whether their gender matters. A between‐subjects experiment (n = 1,602) reveals that regulation‐oriented bureaucrats are assessed as least competent and warm. Moreover, regardless of core task, female bureaucrats are assessed as warmer than males. Female and male bureaucrats are assessed as equally competent. This article shows that bureaucrats are stereotyped by citizens and discusses the implications for the public management literature. Evidence for Practice While researchers and practitioners tend to focus on commonalities between street‐level bureaucrats, focusing on differences—for instance, in terms of core task and gender—may be helpful to understand how citizens see and react to their encounters with bureaucrats. Much like street‐level bureaucrats’ stereotypical notions of citizens, citizens stereotype the bureaucrats they encounter. These stereotypes are based on cues related to the bureaucrats’ core task and gender. Especially for regulation‐oriented organizations and street‐level bureaucrats, such as inspectorates, being aware of stereotypes may be useful when engaging with citizens because they are rated as the least competent and warm.

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Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conceptual Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How Do Citizens Assess Street‐Level Bureaucrats’ Warmth and Competence? A Typology and Test

Boer

2020

Public Administration Review

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“…Building on recent research on candidate selection (e.g. Laustsen & Bor 2017;Ksiazkiewicz et al 2018), we suspect candidates to be displayed as competent, but also as warm and generally likable. This means we expect "in action"-pictures rather than portraits and smiling, positive gestures sooner than photos with a fierce face expression during a speech, for example.…”

Section: Mainstream Parties In the Digital: Public Image Leadership mentioning

confidence: 95%

Tactical Web Use in Bumpy Times – a Comparison of Conservative Parties’ Digital Presence

Borucki¹,

Fitzpatrick²

2019

Preprint

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Facing the ubiquitous and asynchronous nature of digital communication and interaction, parties face the challenge to migrate to some extent into the digital (Fitzpatrick 2018). This is not the case for election campaigns, but for the time in-between elections due to reasons for raising funds and other resources. These processes often rely on the digital sphere. Parties are not only challenged by relocating their communication strategies in normal times into new vessels, but also to encounter increased interactional demands by their target groups - members and supporters (Scarrow 2015). This comes along with the well-researched decline of established parties due to different societal causes (van Biezen, Poguntke 2014; Whiteley 2011, Montigny 2015). Parties’ adaptation of information and communication technologies (ICT) poses another challenge: How to migrate into the digital without losing those who are already engaged offline? How can parties manage to get the best out of both worlds – online and offline – and meet the demands of their adherents? These questions are connected to the research of intra-party democracy (e.g. Close et al. 2017; Faucher and Boy 2018; Bernardi et al. 2017) and leadership (Poguntke and Webb 2005; Musella 2018) as well as to research on parties’ virtual presence (e.g. Römmele 2003).We seek to understand how parties operate online in terms of building relationships between the organization and its members as well as fostering relationships between individual adherents. To grasp what is going on, we analyze parties’ websites and Facebook fan pages. We follow a comparative approach by conducting a pair-comparison. Our cases are the British Conservative Party and the German Christian Democratic Union with a panel data set from 2013 to 2018. Both parties hold governmental responsibility and face national turmoil within their countries. We analyze websites because we assume them serving as a hub of information and exchange for members and supporters. This allows us to investigate how both channels of ICTs are used either to disseminate information or to establish dialogue and discourse on platform media.

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“…Although the precise terms used to describe these abilities vary in the literature, we broadly refer to them as competence and relatability. Qualities bearing on competence and relatability figure prominently in candidate evaluations (e.g., Bittner, 2011;Laustsen and Bor, 2017;Ohr and Oscarsson, 2013). 9 Below, we theorize how liberals and conservatives should judge the competence and relatability of politicians based on whether candidates attended elite or non-elite universities.…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

How voters assess elite-educated politicians: A survey experiment

Gift

Lastra-Anadón

2018

Electoral Studies

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Are politicians with elite backgrounds more electable? In this article, we test whether being an elite is a net positive or negative in running for public office via an original survey experiment that manipulates one of the most salient indicators of eliteness in American life: university education. We find that liberals, but not conservatives, perceive politicians who attended elite schools to be more competent. Meanwhile, conservatives, but not liberals, perceive politicians who attended elite schools to be less relatable. On average, citizens are mildly, but not significantly, less inclined to vote for elite-educated politicians. By embedding treatments in our survey for whether politicians came from advantaged or disadvantaged upbringings, we also confirm that our results do not entirely reflect generic attitudes toward economically privileged candidates.

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The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity

Cited by 70 publications

References 51 publications

How Do Citizens Assess Street‐Level Bureaucrats’ Warmth and Competence? A Typology and Test

How Do Citizens Assess Street‐Level Bureaucrats’ Warmth and Competence? A Typology and Test

Tactical Web Use in Bumpy Times – a Comparison of Conservative Parties’ Digital Presence

How voters assess elite-educated politicians: A survey experiment

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