How do Citizens’ Paint Portraits of Political Leaders? Addressing Overlooked Complexities of Partisan Bias and Beyond

In intellectual debates on representative democracy partisanship and party ties still hold a key position among major factors structuring citizens’ voting choices as well as experiences of the political world, leading to those choices (Campbell et al., 1960; Fiorina, 2002; Weisburg, 2008; Bartels, 2000; Achen, Bartels, 2016). Long-term political attachments are continuously proved to lead to partisan bias and stereotypes that, among other things, ‘tint’ and drive citizens’ judgements of political leaders and candidates (Bartels, 2002; Hayes, 2005, Caruso et al., 2009). The latter trend of research bears a strong focus on a particular aspect of popular perceptions, namely, the valence of citizens’ perceptual biases that translates into polarizations between political support and distance, positive and negative sentiment, elevation of ‘own’ fellow partisan allies and criticism addressed to political challengers and foes (Goren, 2002; Stone, Simas, 2010). However, the emphasis on valence tends to leave aside the complexity of citizens’ evaluative structures, as well as eliminate the question of salience of partisan bias across a wider, multi-dimensional field of perceptual mapping of personalized political leadership. In other words, we know that partisanship inclines citizens to ‘paint’ nasty or nice ‘portraits’ of political leaders, however, little is certain about the variation of content and substantive structural elements of these ‘portraits’. Based on the fresh data of the national representative survey (Lithuanian national election study 2016, N=1500) and (recoded) answers to open-ended questions about respondents’ grounds and motives of positive/ negative evaluations of the heads of major national political parties, the paper explores two salient issues. Firstly, when citizens are free to name what they like and dislike about selected political leaders (party, policy choices, personality, professional experience, leadership style, etc.), which dimensions of (de)legitimizing portrayals are best explained in terms of partisan affiliations, which are not so much, and why? Secondly, if, in a challenge to Achen and Bartels’ (2016) arguments, dealignment and „apartisans“ (Dalton, 2012) are on the rise in ‚old‘ democracies, and electoral volatility is still a fact of political life in new European democracies (Tavits, 2008; Ramonaite, 2014), what are major lines of difference in evaluations of party leaders between distinct societal groups – party affiliates and citizens who do not feel connected to any political party or even declare animosity to party politics itself? The paper extends and tests the conception of „Democracy for Realists“ beyond the U.S. and Western European democratic environments.