The Role of Identity in the Assessment of Public Figures

The argument in this project is that a candidate’s expected political positions can be inferred from the different elements of the candidate’s social group-based identity. It is distinguished from assessments of candidate behavior, which focus on the candidate as a delegate, someone who will follow through on his stated campaign promises. When a voter finds the public policy positions of a candidate to be incomplete, vague, or manipulative – offering popular policy positions and avoiding issues that would lose votes – and/or where candidate ideology is unsystematic, it is helpful to be able to rely on additional information on likely candidate preferences. Therefore to discern what a candidate is likely to do in office, voters can infer candidate tendencies based on his or her social group affiliations. A voter can predict a candidate’s policy preferences, especially with respect to cleavage issues by examining his or her social group attachments. Then, voters will choose the individual who has same predicted preferences as they do; i.e. the ideal surrogate.Accordingly, the first hypothesis of the paper is that in an environment of asymmetric and costly information, the use of identity in evaluating political figures is a rational one. The second hypothesis is that identity, along with other decisionmaking elements interact. People may use identity as a way of interpreting policy information yielding respondents hybrid information.The test involved an internet survey, which asked individuals to evaluate public figures in terms of warmth. Then, respondents were asked about the elements that went into their warmth estimates. Respondents were asked about how much the public figure seemed to share their concerns. The purpose of these questions was to way to measure a sense of shared identity in a way so as to deal with fragmented identities. Using the subjective, indirect approach to identity we can avoid externally derived categories, and instead let people describe and define themselves. An awareness of intersectionality encourages use to allow a person to define him or herself.In comparing between two particular candidates, sometimes respondents emphasized identity elements or an interaction of identity and valence, or issues. For other candidate combinations, identity was not (e.g., comparing Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden). Voters used identity as a metric for evaluating public figures as it seem appropriate.The paper also relies on Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) to understand how voters understand larger groups of public figures in relation to each other. Thus rather than a pair by pair comparison, MDS allows us to create a spatial map to display the respondents’ perceptual relationships among public figures. Public figures positioned closer to each other are perceived as more similar. We can then incorporate an additional test to see how well the variables of identity, issues, and valence, along with their interactions explain the display of geometric relationships. The result is that we see that identity is important in how the public assesses public figures. It can act as both a separate element for evaluation, as well as through interactions with issues and valence.