More and more, elections around the world seem to be won or lost on the basis of the candidates’ personal qualities rather than their policies. Despite its prevalence and consequences, we still know very little about what explains such candidate-centered voting, particularly in new democratic contexts. I argue that variation in candidate-centered voting is largely a function of political sophistication: voters with higher levels of political sophistication are better able to process information relating to policy and performance, which tends to be more cognitively demanding than information relating to candidate’s personalities. To test this argument, I estimate models of vote choice and electoral utility using survey data from the 2002 presidential election in Brazil. The results largely support my contention that political sophistication conditions the weight of candidate considerations relative to policy and performance considerations. / text

More and more, elections around the world seem to be won or lost on the basis of the candidates’ personal qualities rather than their policies. Despite its prevalence in new and established democracies alike, we still know very little about what explains such candidate-centered voting. This study moves our understanding of this issue by examining variation in candidate-centered voting across individuals and electoral contexts in recent presidential elections in the United States, Brazil, and Mexico. I argue that candidate-centered voting is largely an information problem. At the individual level, I focus on the conditioning role of political sophistication, arguing that voters with higher levels of political sophistication engage in less candidate-centered voting due their increased capacity to manage the more cognitively demanding types of information related to policy and performance. Moving beyond the individual level, I consider how candidate-centered voting may vary across electoral contexts as well. In particular, I consider how the institutionalization and structure of political competition shape the cognitive demands on voters, making it more or less difficult for voters to evaluate candidates on bases other than their personalities. To test these arguments, I estimate models of voters’ electoral utilities and vote choices using electoral survey data from the U.S. (2008), Brazil (2002), and Mexico (2000 and 2006). Overall, the empirical analysis supports my individual-level argument regarding political sophistication’s conditioning role. As political sophistication increases, the dominance of candidate considerations in voters’ electoral decisions tends to decrease. Likewise, comparisons in the level of candidate-centered voting across the elections under study suggest that certain aspects of the institutionalization and structure of political competition may help explain contextual variation in candidate-centered voting. / text