In this research spotlight, a study by Bennett Callaghan and his coauthors, Michael Kraus and John Dovidio, examines how voters of different social classes evaluate interpersonal qualities.
How do voters across the socio-economic spectrum value competence in politicians? A new study shows that qualities such as competence and warmth are valued differently by voters of different social classes. In three experiments, the researchers — Stone Center postdoctoral scholar Bennett Callaghan, recently of Yale University, along with Michael Kraus and John Dovidio of Yale — found that voters with a relatively high socio-economic status were more likely to prefer a candidate perceived as competent than a candidate perceived as warm. The opposite was found to be true among voters of a relatively low socio-economic status, who preferred politicians seen as warm.
Competence, according to well-known frameworks like the Stereotype Content Model, is a measure of a person’s perceived ability to carry out their intentions, and includes personal qualities such as intelligence, confidence, and capability. Warmth, on the other hand, includes qualities such as honesty, trustworthiness, and kindness, and is a measure of a person’s perceived intentions toward others. Previous studies have shown that, when evaluating specific political candidates, voters generally place greater value on competence than on warmth.
However, there has been little research about how voters of various socio-economic classes respond to specific candidates and how this response is tied to specific candidates’ perceived personal qualities. In their new study, “Social Class Predicts Preference for Competent Politicians,” Callaghan and his coauthors investigated how perceptions of competence related to voters’ socio-economic status, and whether these perceptions could predict preferences for particular candidates.
In the first two experiments, participants read descriptions of ostensibly real candidates and evaluated them. The third study used exit poll data to analyze how actual candidates fared with voters of different social classes. All three studies showed that voters of a higher social class indicated a greater likelihood — compared to voters of a lower social class — of voting for candidates seen as competent. Voters of a higher social class were also more likely to prefer competent candidates to warm ones. Participants in the studies demonstrated these preferences both when they were provided with descriptions of ostensibly real candidates and, in the case of the third study, when they were voting in actual elections.
The researchers also considered the issue of race. In the first two studies, they found that measuring and controlling for race did not have a significant impact on the results; however, the sample size of non-white participants might not have been large enough to determine the effect of race. Data constraints limited the researchers’ ability to look at the combined influence of race and class in the third study. However, they note, previous research has shown that politicians shift the amount of competence-related language they use when speaking to white audiences compared with non-white audiences, based on stereotypes they hold about these groups. Because white individuals and those of higher socio-economic status are both stereotyped as competent, it is possible that politicians are already attempting to use a similar strategy to appeal to voters of higher socio-economic status.
“These findings shed light on which (and how) politicians successfully communicate with higher-class individuals, who are highly influential in the political process,” the researchers write in the study. “Our research implies that the signaling of competence might, indeed, facilitate communication with higher-class individuals…[and] provides tentative empirical backing for class-based communication strategies that politicians may already employ.”