Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population-based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2020-04, Vol.64 (2), p.240-255
Main Authors: Laustsen, Lasse, Petersen, Michael Bang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Candidates
Citizens
Conflict
Dominance
Experiments
Impressions
Internet
Political campaigns
Political leadership
Politics
Psychology
Voting
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Summary:In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population-based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies of candidate personalities in their long-term memory and (2) retrieve different tallies depending on the context. In particular, we predict and demonstrate that when contexts become more conflict-ridden, candidate evaluations rapidly shift from being negatively to positively associated with online impressions of candidate dominance. Although the notion of online tallies was originally proposed as an explanation of why citizens are able to vote for candidates on the basis of policy agreement, we demonstrate how the existence of context-sensitive online tallies can favor dominant candidates, even if the candidate is otherwise unappealing or does not share policy views with citizens on key issues.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12490