I Like Him, But…: Vote Choice When Candidate Likeability and Closeness on Issues Clash

Abstract

The importance of likeability, broadly defined, has been understood by political candidates and their handlers probably for as long as campaigns have existed. Common phrases such as “clothes make the man [woman]” and “looks can be deceiving” tell us much about how human beings are impacted by the visual (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster 1972). But candidate likeability goes beyond the physical, including personality traits that may be explicitly or implicitly applied to a candidate, sometimes simply on the basis of physical appearance (Riggle et al. 1992). Social psychologists have long documented a “beauty is good” stereotype (Berscheid and Walster 1974) where more physically attractive people are assumed to possess a range of more positive personality traits and to generate a more positive emotional response.

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Support for data collection and analyses came from National Science Foundation grants SBR-9411162 to the first author and SBR-9321236 to the second author. Redlawsk gratefully acknowledges support from the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 3–6, 2003 and at the Shambaugh Conference on Affect and Cognition in Political Action, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, March 6–9, 2003.