Exploiting Donald Trump: Using Candidates' Positions to Assess Ideological Voting in the 2016 and 2008 Presidential Elections

Testing theories of how candidate positions affect voting is often complicated by the strong correlation between candidate partisanship and candidate positions. We take advantage of Donald Trump's unusual candidacy to understand how candidates who depart from standard party positions affect perceptions of ideology and voting. We show in both 2016 and 2008 that respondents were more likely to report voting for the more ideologically proximate candidate, an advantage enjoyed by Trump in 2016 at much higher rates, in part because he was perceived as more moderate than prior candidates. What is most exceptional about Trump relative to previous candidates, however, is that voters were much less willing to place him anywhere in an ideological space. Being unwilling to place Trump was correlated with being much less likely to vote for him and suggests that some voters do not reward ambiguous or nonstandard issue positioning. More generally, we find evidence that in the contemporary era of strong partisan attachments, some voters still appear to decide which candidate to support, in part, on assessments of candidate ideology.

检验候选人立场如何影响选民投票的相关理论，往往会因候选人党派倾向与其政策立场之间存在强相关性而陷入研究困境。我们依托唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）的非常规参选经历，旨在探究偏离主流政党立场的候选人，将如何影响选民对其意识形态的认知与投票决策。通过分析2008年与2016年的调研数据，我们发现受访者均更倾向于报告自己将选票投给了意识形态立场更为相近的候选人；2016年特朗普在该维度上的优势更为显著，其部分原因在于选民普遍认为他比此前的参选候选人更为温和。不过，相较于过往参选者，特朗普最具特殊性的一点在于，多数选民更不愿将其划归至某一意识形态谱系之中。不愿对特朗普进行意识形态定位的选民，同样表现出更低的投票支持意愿，这一结果表明，部分选民并不会认可或青睐候选人模糊不清或偏离标准的议题立场。从更宏观的视角来看，我们的研究证实，在当前党派依附性极强的时代背景下，仍有部分选民会在一定程度上，基于对候选人意识形态属性的评估来做出支持选择。