Annex - Comparing Experiments: Political leaders, opinion formation and voting decisions in presidential and parliamentary systems

Abstract

Research on Ieader effects on voting behavior faces major problems of endogeneity. With traditional survey data, one can hardly detect where Ieader evaluations come from. ln this article four experimental studies in Germany, Sweden, France and the USA are presented that try to find evidence on the relative importance of political and apolitical candidate traits in presidential and parliamentary systems. The results indicate that seemingly apolitical evaluations of Ieaders often have a political origin and that character traits of candidates do have a much weaker influence in parliamentary voting decisions than in presidential voting decisions. These findings are robust across the four countries.