Replication Data for: Online Tallies and the Context of Politics: How Online Tallies Make Dominant Candidates Appear Competent in Contexts of Conflict

In this article, we extend the classical notion of online tallies to shed light on the psychology underlying the rapid emergence of dominant political leaders. Predicated on two population-based panel surveys with embedded experiments, we demonstrate that citizens (1) store extremely durable tallies of candidate personalities in their long-term memory and (2) retrieve different tallies depending on the context. In particular, we predict and demonstrate that when contexts become more conflict-ridden, candidate evaluations rapidly shift from being negatively to positively associated with online impressions of candidate dominance. Although the notion of online tallies was originally proposed as an explanation of why citizens are able to vote for candidates on the basis of policy agreement, we demonstrate how the existence of context-sensitive online tallies can favor dominant candidates, even if the candidate is otherwise unappealing or does not share policy views with citizens on key issues.

本文中，我们拓展了经典的在线 tally（online tallies）概念，以揭示强势政治领袖快速崛起背后的心理学底层机制。本研究基于两项内嵌实验的人群追踪调查，证实选民存在两类行为特征：其一，会将候选人的人格特质以持久性极强的tally形式存储于长期记忆；其二，会依据不同情境调取对应的tally。具体而言，我们预测并验证了当情境愈发充满冲突时，选民对候选人的评价会快速从与候选人支配性的在线印象呈负相关，转变为呈正相关。尽管在线 tally 的概念最初被提出，用于解释选民为何能够依据政策契合度为候选人投票，但本研究证实，即便某候选人在其他方面缺乏吸引力，或是在核心议题上与选民政策立场相左，情境敏感型在线 tally 的存在仍可助力强势候选人胜出。