Class Year
2022
Document Type
Student Research Paper
Date of Creation
Fall 2019
Department 1
Political Science
Abstract
Ideological moderation is often assumed to inform a candidate's electability. This article examines the effects of a voters’ perceptions of a candidate’s ideology on the voters’ belief in the candidate’s ability to win the election. Using data from the American National Election Survey from 2008 and 2016, the paper compares the effect of the perceived ideology of a candidate and individuals' predictions about the candidate that will win. Opinions regarding Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Donald Trump are analyzed. The results suggest that for the Democratic candidates, voters who believed them to be more moderate or conservative were more likely to believe they would win than those who thought they were more liberal. However, the results suggested no similar relationship existed for the Republican candidates with no effect of ideological moderation on election outcome predictions.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Dalgleish, Emily C., "The Enigma of Electability: How Do Voters Predict Who Can Win?" (2019). Student Publications. 766.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/766
Comments
Written for POL 215: Methods of Political Science.