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I examined how voters' attitudes may be influenced by celebrity endorsement of a political candidate. In the study I drew upon reactance theory, reinforcement theory, social identification theory, and the elaboration likelihood model to investigate the effects on young decided and undecided
(swing) voters of party identification and identification with a celebrity endorser in a political campaign. I used a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial design to examine the factors of voters' party identification, identification with a celebrity endorser, and status of voting
intention of 256 U.S. university students enrolled in a journalism course. The results suggest that party identification and identification with a celebrity endorser are predictors of effectiveness for celebrity endorsement of political candidates. Theoretical and practical implications are
discussed.

TWO HYPOTHESES ARE TESTED HERE: (1) A CONDIDATE WHO DOES NOT TAKE ISSUE STANDS WILL BE RATED MORE FAVORABLY BY POTENTIAL VOTERS THAN CANDIDATES WHO ANNOUNCE POSITIONS; AND (2) A CANDIDATE WHO ALWAYS TAKES POPULAR SIDE OF AN ISSUE WILL BE RATED MORE FAVORABLY THAN CANDIDATES WHO ADOPTED EITHER CONSISTENTLY LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS. HYPOTHESIS (1) WAS CONFIRMED; (2) IS MORE AMBIGUOUS

The present research examines how warmth communications shape classbased patterns of political candidate support. Drawing on theory and evidence that lower-class individuals are more attuned to others, we predicted that, relative to upper-class individuals, they will modulate their trust and support in response to communications of warmth generated by and about political figures. In Experiment 1, lower-class compared to upper-class participants reported less trust and support for a political candidate who communicated his warmth in a campaign video, while no class differences emerged when he communicated competence or hostility to an opponent instead. In Experiment 2, lower-class compared to upper-class participants reported greater trust and support for a political figure whose warmth was communicated by a lower-class member, but no class difference emerged when the same communication was by an upper-class member. Implications for eliciting trust through warmth communication in cross-class interactions are discussed.

AbstractObjectification and dehumanization are topics often discussed within the social psychology and feminist theory literature. Research on objectification has largely focused on the sexual objectification of women's bodies, whereas the dehumanization literature has focused on dehumanization in the context of racial and ethnic groups. Extant political science research has only recently begun to engage with these concepts. In this manuscript, we build upon these literatures and apply these insights to questions relevant to politics. In particular, we argue that objectifying and dehumanizing portrayals of women impact how voters evaluate women politicians and how much they support gender parity in politics. Through a proposed experimental design, we test our hypothesis that the objectification of women as a group can decrease positive evaluations and likelihood of electoral support for women political candidates.

This case discusses the process and benefits of ethnographic research of candidate recruitment by local political parties. Ethnography is especially useful in this research area, as candidate recruitment is a closed, "inside" process that incorporates several veto-holding stakeholders and a range of considerations that are challenging to disentangle using other methods. Participant-observer data are richer and more substantively significant, especially in this case, as the ethnographer was the subject of candidate recruitment by both major political parties (Republicans and Democrats) in the same 12-month period. This unusual "co-partisan" recruitment effort, paired with a bottom-up methodological view provided by the participant-generated data made for a unique research opportunity. The resulting data make robust comparison and contrast possible, even given limits in record keeping and the limited generalizability inherent to ethnographic analysis. The case also highlights the challenges of confirming the findings in question, but recommendations for future research provide some options to explore.

Studies show that automatic trait inferences can predict outcomes of actual elections, but these studies generally include male candidates only. Substantial evidence also shows that female candidates are subject to gender-based stereotypes, which can lead to differences in how men and women candidates are evaluated. This article combines these two literatures to compare the effects of competence, threat, and attractiveness inferences in elections that include women. We use experimental data in which candidate pairs from state and local US elections were judged on these three traits and examine whether those ratings are predictive of election outcomes. We find that although competence matters most for elections involving only men, attractiveness predicts winners in women-only elections. In mixed-gender races, competence inferences predict success when the female candidate is perceived as more competent than the male candidate. Finally, unlike men, women benefit from being perceived as physically threatening in mixed-gender races.