The Dark Side of the Mood. Candidate Evaluation, Voter Perceptions, and the Driving Role of (Dark) Personality Traits.

Many psychologist and psychiatrists have labelled Donald Trump a narcissist, a psychopath or accused him of Machiavellian behaviour. Yet, dark personality in politics is not only relevant in the case of Trump: as politics is increasingly getting darker, through rising incivility and affective polarization, the dark personality traits of political leaders around the world are gaining attention. Although there are many studies that show that desired leadership traits (such as competence, integrity, decisiveness or empathy) affects candidate evaluation and voting behaviour (oftentimes effectuated trough media coverage on politicians), little is known about the impact of personality traits on voter’s assessment of candidates, especially the ‘darker’ ones. This study fills this gap by studying the extent to which (mediated) candidate dark personality matters for candidate evaluations. Thereby, it expands our knowledge on the negativity effect, that states that negative information about a candidate more strongly affects voters than positive candidate information, by testing the negativity bias hypothesis for undesirable, negatively charged personality traits. It additionally tests to what extent candidate’s (mediated) personality affects voters above and beyond partisanship, which is strongly endogenous to candidate evaluations. It does so by triangulating evidence from two independent studies. Study 1 uses data from a survey among American voters (N=1,064) collected in the direct aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election. It investigates the relationship between voters’ partisan attitudes, perceived (dark) personality of the two main candidates (Trump and Biden), and candidate evaluation. This study confirms the driving role of partisanship for candidate perception and shows that perceptions of a candidate’s dark personality affects general candidate favourability. Study 2 constitutes an experimental study among US voters (N=1,330), in which the personality of a fictive candidate in terms of scoring high or low on dark traits (narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism) is manipulated and the effects on candidate evaluation are measured. Because no explicit partisan cues were associated with the fictive candidate in this study, the experimental protocol allows us to exclude any intervening effect of partisan attitudes both on how respondents perceive the personality of the candidate and their subsequent evaluation. The findings show that exposure to media messages containing negative personality cues, that is, to a candidate framed as having a dark personality, significantly and substantially reduces positive evaluations for the candidate. Exposure to newspaper articles that cues positive personality traits does not substantively increase positive perceptions of the candidate. Furthermore, models comparing exposure to the two types of personality cues (scoring high or low on dark traits) providing additional empirical evidence for the negativity bias. All in all, both studies confirm the relevance of dark personality traits for candidate evaluation and the existence of asymmetric effects for perceived presence or absence of dark traits. This is crucial information for getting a more comprehensive picture of the way voters assess candidates, especially in times of dark and negative politics.