Abstract Previous work has shown candidate electability is an important consideration to voters in deciding who to support. However, we do not know what candidate qualities voters consider more electable, especially in the absence of polling information. While scholarship has documented general election penalties for candidates with certain demographic and ideological characteristics, we do not know whether voters actually use these factors when judging electability. Using a conjoint experimental design, we examine how candidate characteristics influence perceptions of candidate electability. We find voters perceive women and minorities as less electable and ideologically extreme candidates as more electable. However, perceptions of electability vary with voter characteristics. Our results indicate that arguments about electability, for many individuals, are based on their own ideological preferences (and to a lesser extent, their identity) rather than systematically viewing candidates with attributes that provide general election advantages as more electable.

Previous research showed that the stereotype of women politicians is incongruent with the general politician stereotype, which can be disadvantageous for women seeking political office. Based on the strong influx of women politicians in US politics, and the increased familiarity of the electorate with women in political leadership positions, we expect that voters now have a clearer picture of women politicians and that their stereotype is more congruent with the traits desired in political leaders. In testing this, we make a methodological contribution to the study of stereotyping by adapting a large-N list experiment as an effective and innovative measurement of stereotype endorsement. The results show important changes in gendered political stereotypes over the last ten years. The evolution of the women politician stereotype is encouraging: the traits that people associate with women politicians are more positive than ten years ago and more congruent to desirable traits for politicians. However, the findings also underscore the continuing masculinity of the political domain, by the strong overlap between the stereotype of men politicians and politicians in general. Even more pronounced than the positive trend for women politicians is the unfavorable evolution of the stereotypes of men politicians and politicians generally, which shows a strong downfall compared to a decade ago.

According to theories on ideological differences, individuals who endorse the values of freedom, justice, and equality are expected to be left-wing oriented, whereas individuals who endorse authoritarian values are expected to be right-wing oriented. I hypothesize that such associations do not hold in the Arab world, where in the context of past state formation trajectories, leftists and secularists endorsed an authoritarian-nationalist discourse to build post-colonial states, while Islamists endorsed a freedom-and-justice discourse as a reaction to state oppression. Using original representative face-to-face survey data collected right after the 2019 Tunisian elections, I test this hypothesis by examining which values determine citizens’ voting behavior in both parliamentary and presidential elections. Results show that people who endorse liberty-and-justice values are more likely to vote for Islamist right-wing parties, whereas those who endorse authoritarian-nationalist values are more likely to vote for leftist parties. These results have important implications for the study of voting behavior in the Arab world and in comparative politics.

This paper investigates if individuals’ negative assessments of the future drive micro-level reluctance for international cooperation and reciprocal behavior, a core principle of multilateralism. To test our theoretical expectations, we field online survey experiments on a sample of over 3000 respondents in the US and Turkey in October–November 2020. The experimental results show that on average, individuals are fairly sensitive to target countries’ policy actions and are inclined to reciprocate when contemplating whether to increase contributions to UN or consent to bilateral trade liberalization. Yet, further analyses concur that individual inclinations to reciprocate are substantially moderated by their future expectations. Specifically, individuals who are more pessimistic about their material prospects remain fairly indifferent to the positive actions of other countries, but are more likely to penalize negative foreign policy actions by reciprocating in kind.

This paper examines how partisanship and electoral autocracy (vis-à-vis democracy) influence people’s perceptions of party system polarization in their country. Although partisanship generally enhances subjective party system polarization, I posit that this relationship depends on who is in power and the nature of political regime. Cognitive dissonance between losing an election and believing that one’s party is the best motivates partisans of parties out of power to see their country’s parties as less ideologically distinct compared to partisans of governing parties. Political regimes matter too because higher stakes of political competition and skewed information environment in electoral autocracies not only encourage all citizens to see parties as more polarized, but also magnify the positive impact of partisanship—particularly co-partisanship with governing parties—on subjective party system polarization. Using individual-level data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (1996–2019), the empirical analyses support these expectations, even when accounting for party system polarization based on expert party placements. These findings have important implications for scholarly debates on partisanship, electoral autocracy, and the nature of subjective electoral supply in contemporary electoral regimes.