ABSTRACT
Candidate character traits are relatively stable aspects of a candidate's personality or character. They are psychological or mental qualities or highly related behavioral dispositions, not physical or demographic characteristics, such as race, gender, or age. The list of candidate character traits that might be important to voters is long. Voters perceive character traits of presidential candidates. One very influential attempt to conceptualize candidate character traits is Donald Kinder's 1986 study, which analyzed a large number of character traits and found that they could be reduced to four basic trait dimensions: leadership, competence, integrity, and empathy. Leadership is considered to be an important candidate character trait by almost all scholars, but the definition of this concept is often vague. Only major-party voters are included in the analysis between perceptions of candidate character traits and the vote, and analyze the determinants of these trait perceptions.
