Abstract
Drawing from the field of management studies, we explore how a sample of voters in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom use a leader character framework to judge political leadership. We ask, how do voters actually assess the character of their current leaders? And, in light of the populist zeitgeist, do people who hold a populist attitude differ markedly in how they judge the character of political leaders? Our results show that voters generally consider character important. However, voters who lean toward populism believe character matters less in political leadership than individuals who scored low on the populism indicator. This durable difference merits more exploration in a political context marked by populism. Our findings about the factors that influence vote choice contribute to this conversation and to extant research that reports that some voters pay greater attention to leader characteristics than do others.
Highlights
Writing about political parties in Western Europe, Cas Mudde notes that parties on the right of the political spectrum enjoy a favourable discursive environment (2013, p. 15)
The survey instrument was designed to address four research questions: Does character matter to voters? Are all eleven dimensions that comprise the leader character framework considered essential for political leadership? How do voters assess the character of their current leaders? And do voters who hold a populist attitude differ markedly in how they judge the character of political leaders?
We focus on four research questions: Does character matter to voters? Are all eleven dimensions that comprise the leader character framework considered essential for political leadership? How do voters assess the character of their current leaders? And do populist voters on the right differ markedly in how they judge the character of political leaders? The section explains our methodology and presents the results in light of each specific research question
Summary
Writing about political parties in Western Europe, Cas Mudde notes that parties on the right of the political spectrum enjoy a favourable discursive environment (2013, p. 15). Mudde suggests many of the policies pursued by popular radical right parties reflect existing attitudes and policy preferences among democratic voters. We probe in this study how citizens of voting age in Canada, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US) judge the character of their political leaders. The survey instrument was designed to address four research questions: Does character matter to voters? Are all eleven dimensions that comprise the leader character framework considered essential for political leadership? Do voters who hold a populist attitude differ markedly in how they judge the character of political leaders?. We introduce a new framework for character evaluation that has been developed and validated by scholars working in management studies and employed in research on organizational leadership. We summarize the study’s methodology, describe the main findings gleaned from the survey and offer a brief conclusion
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