CANDIDATE QUALITY AND THE CONGRESSIONAL VOTE - A CAUSAL CONNECTION

Anecdotal evidence and correlational studies provide consistent eviden ce that the skill and integrity of legislative incumbents strongly aff ect those representatives' prospects for reelection. What is less clea r, however, is why these effects occur. In particular, previous resear ch fails to establish that voters incorporate objective information pe rtaining to candidate quality in the decision calculus. We address thi s issue through use of a laboratory experiment in which objective desc riptions of the skill and integrity of US. House candidates were varie d. Results reveal that both feeling thermometer scores and the vote ch oice were influenced by the information concerning candidate quality. The effects of skill and integrity were not attenuated by our particip ants' partisan attachments or political knowledge, nor by variance in the information format or the candidates' issue positions. Collectivel y, these results suggest that candidate quality may exert broad influe nce on the vote choice, and that this influence operates independently from other conventional predictors of the vote. Copyright (C) 1996 El sevier Science Ltd.