Voter evaluation of candidates and party leaders

The major aims of this chapter are to summarize the existing literature on candidate and leader effects in democratic elections, to point out its inherent shortcomings and to outline a comprehensive agenda for future research in this field. The chapter starts with an inventory of works dealing with the dimensionality of politicians’ traits and the cognitive mechanisms that drive voters’ appraisal of their personality. It then reviews the available works on the electoral effect of candidate evaluations on voting, focusing in turn on candidate effects in presidential systems and party leader effects in parliamentary systems. The following section deals with a number of methodological and measurement issues related to this body of research, focusing in particular on the problem of reciprocal causation between candidate evaluations and other covariates in the voting function, and the potential feedback effect from the dependent variable. The final section discusses the role played by old and new media in driving candidate and leader effects across time. The chapter then concludes with a selected inventory of open questions in the field.