Trick of the Traits. An Experimental Study on the Impact of Trait Ownership on Mediated Leader effects.

There is tentative evidence that the media portrayal of party leaders in terms of their character traits affects voters in their perceptions of party leaders and, ultimately, in their vote choice. However, there are little experimental studies that focus on the causality of these mediated leader effects. This paper fills this lacuna. We test not only which leadership traits and which tone of the media reports impacts voters most strongly, but also how partisan stereotypes moderate mediated leader effects. We designed two online large-scale survey experiments in which the leader traits, the tone of the evaluation and the leader’s party are manipulated: one among Austrian voters (N=500) and one among the Dutch electorate (1Vandaag Opinie Panel, over 20 thousand unique respondents). We rely on the theory of trait ownership, which states that just as parties can own issues, party leaders can also own character traits. This leads us to hypothesize that media reports on political competence and vigorousness have stronger impact on the perceptions of right-wing politicians, while media reports on integrity and communicative skills are especially influential for left-wing politicians.