ABSTRACT
Voter perceptions of candidate character traits exert substantial effects on the vote. While voters can draw inferences about a candidate's personal traits from other media, television is more likely to promote such inferences, given its visual representation of a candidate's movements, physical appearance, and other non-verbal idiosyncrasies. A frequent argument is that television tends to personalize politics, emphasizing candidates and personal traits, while de-emphasizing policy. Furthermore, the voters have identified as particularly taking account of their perceptions of the candidates' character traits also are strongly influenced by partisanship, ideology, and evaluations of government performance. The effects of varying levels of media consumption are not that drastic, but they do exist. Thus, the findings reported earlier are not the result of the confounding effects of education or age, increasing our confidence that voters who consume more television news put more weight on the character traits of the candidates.
