Replication Data for: Do Bilinguals Respond More Favorably to Candidate Advertisements in English or in Spanish?

Candidates for political office in the United States can appeal to constituents in either English or in Spanish. We investigate the consequences of this choice in a series of survey experiments conducted on large, diverse samples of both monolingual and bilingual Americans. We take advantage of parallel advertisements produced in both English and Spanish by real candidates for national office—one presidential and two congressional. Because our design holds constant candidates’ policy positions, we can attribute the effects on vote choice directly to the choice of language over and above other candidate attributes. In two of our three experiments, the Spanish-language advertisements increased candidates’ electoral support by 5 percentage points among bilinguals. We find the opposite pattern of results among English-speaking monolingual Americans, who respond very negatively to Spanish-language advertisements. Our results shed light on the strategic calculus of candidates who must appeal to multiple linguistic communities at once.

美国政治公职候选人可通过英语或西班牙语向选民开展竞选宣传。本研究依托针对单语及双语美国民众构建的大型多样性样本，开展一系列调查实验，探究此类语言选择所产生的影响。我们借助真实全国性公职候选人（含1名总统候选人和2名国会议员候选人）制作的英西双语平行竞选广告展开研究。由于本实验设计将候选人的政策立场控制为恒定变量，因此可将投票选择层面的效应直接归因于语言选择本身，而非其他候选人特质。在三组实验中的两组里，西班牙语广告使双语选民的候选人支持率提升了5个百分点；而在英语单语美国民众中则呈现完全相反的结果——他们对西班牙语广告的接受度显著为负。本研究结果为需同时面向多语言社群开展竞选活动的候选人的战略决策逻辑提供了理论启示。