Candidate Quality and the Congressional Vote: A Causal Connection?

Anecdotal evidence and correlational studies provide consistent evidence that the skill and integrity of legislative incumbents strongly affect those representatives' prospects for reelection. What is less clear, however, is why these effects occur. In particular, previous research fails to establish that voters incorporate objective information pertaining to candidate quality in the decision calculus. We address this issue through use of a laboratory experiment in which objective descriptions of the skill and integrity of US. House candidates were varied. Results reveal that both feeling thermometer scores and the vote choice were influenced by the information concerning candidate quality. The effects of skill and integrity were not attenuated by our participants' partisan attachments or political knowledge, nor by variance in the information format or the candidates' issue positions. Collectively, these results suggest that candidate quality may exert broad influence on the vote choice, and that this influence operates independently from other conventional predictors of the vote.