Voters’ Latent Preferences and Support for Real Candidates: Insights from Czech Elections

How stable are voters’ latent preferences for ideal presidential candidates? Do election campaigns and changes in real-world preferences provoke shifts in latent preferences? If yes, which voters are the most affected? This preregistered study investigates the stability and change in latent preferences and how they relate to support for real-world politicians. Our research design uses conjoint experiments to analyse latent preferences for presidential candidates. Compared to previous designs, we implement a dynamic dimension into it as we repeated conjoint experiments in three waves of a larger panel survey. This allows us to focus on the stability of latent preferences for ideal presidential candidate. Drawing on the literature on attitudinal stability and vote choice, this study formulates four sets of original hypotheses. In general, they focus on the effect of political engagement, media consumption and real-world preferences for presidential candidates, on the stability of latent preferences. The empirical analyses leverage repeated conjoint experiments embedded in a general four-wave panel study conducted in the context of the 2023 Czech presidential election. The findings yield novel insights into voter preferences and the constructs measured by conjoint experiments.