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Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict
Author(s) -
Laustsen Lasse,
Petersen Michael Bang
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12490
Subject(s) - dominance (genetics) , politics , context (archaeology) , personality psychology , social psychology , population , psychology , sociology , internet privacy , political science , public relations , computer science , law , personality , geography , archaeology , biochemistry , chemistry , demography , gene
In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population‐based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies of candidate personalities in their long‐term memory and (2) retrieve different tallies depending on the context. In particular, we predict and demonstrate that when contexts become more conflict‐ridden, candidate evaluations rapidly shift from being negatively to positively associated with online impressions of candidate dominance. Although the notion of online tallies was originally proposed as an explanation of why citizens are able to vote for candidates on the basis of policy agreement, we demonstrate how the existence of context‐sensitive online tallies can favor dominant candidates, even if the candidate is otherwise unappealing or does not share policy views with citizens on key issues.