Crooked Hillary and Sleepy Joe: name-calling’s backfire effect on candidate evaluations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Throughout his political career Donald Trump has utilized name-calling when referring to his opponents. These pejoratives are a ubiquitous part of political discourse in contemporary society. Scholarly research has yet to examine the effect that this type of incivility has on individuals’ evaluations of both the attacker (i.e. the person using name-calling) and the victim. Our research aims to fill this gap by testing the effect of name-calling through the implementation of a national survey experiment. We test the effect of name-calling on candidate evaluations by randomly inserting a pejorative in front of a fictitious candidate’s name in a news story. Our findings indicate that name-calling often backfires. Respondents who saw the pejorative tend to rate the attacker lower. Our findings also show an odd partisan symmetry in how respondents rate this behavior by their co-partisans, i.e. both Republicans and Democrats punish Democratic candidates that use name-calling but ignore Republicans’ use of it.