AUTHOR=Nai Alessandro , Maier Jürgen , Vranić Jug TITLE=Personality Goes a Long Way (for Some). An Experimental Investigation Into Candidate Personality Traits, Voters’ Profile, and Perceived Likeability JOURNAL=Frontiers in Political Science VOLUME=3 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2021.636745 DOI=10.3389/fpos.2021.636745 ISSN=2673-3145 ABSTRACT=
The personality traits of political candidates, and the way these are perceived by the public at large, matter for political representation and electoral behavior. Disentangling the effects of partisanship and perceived personality on candidate evaluations is however notoriously a tricky business, as voters tend to evaluate the personality of candidates based on their partisan preferences. In this article we tackle this issue via innovative experimental data. We present what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study that manipulates the personality traits of a candidate and assesses its subsequent effects. The design, embedded in an online survey distributed to a convenience sample of US respondents (MTurk,