Impact of Voters' Evaluations of Leaders’ Traits on Voting Behaviour: Evidence from Five European Countries

This paper aims to examine how the evaluation of party leaders’ traits influences voting behavior. The work incorporates data from election studies across five countries with different social contexts (Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Germany and Hungary). Leaders’ characteristics were grouped into two traits: competence and warmth, in accordance with the stereotype content model and relevant studies on leaders' traits evaluation. Since different personality traits were evaluated within each country, the analysis was based on the two considered dimensions and by the leader political ideology. Multiple regressions were performed to verify the predictive power of competence and warmth on vote controlling for voters’ socio-demographic and political ideology variables.