What makes a successful candidate? Political experience and low-information cues in elections

Abstract

It is well established that politically experienced candidates are electorally more successful than “novices.” However, methodological challenges have prevented scholars from establishing how much of this is attributable to voters who use political experience as a cue to infer competence. Further, information about political experience may decrease the weight voters place on other, less informative cues. In a natural quasi-experiment, I exploit the condition that—in the 2015 Swiss national elections—information about candidates’ political experience on party ballots varied approximately at random. In line with cue-based accounts, I show that political experience is most of an asset if it is mentioned on the ballot. Contrary to expectations, however, these cues do not crowd out group-membership cues such as those based on a candidate’s migration background. The results from two original candidate choice survey experiments, designed to measure causal processes, further corroborate these findings.