Michael Nelson  |   Published August 27, 2021

Summer Research: ‘Political Candidates on a Stick’

Incoming students created a survey experiment and found that a candidate’s lifestyle choices can affect their perception among the public.

During this summer’s SOfIA program, incoming students Bobby Blaschke, Anna Brunner and Tailey Gray worked with student mentor Matthew Datlof ’22 and political science professor Andre Audette on a survey experiment to determine whether and how a political candidate’s lifestyle choices might affect their perception among the public. They received over a 1000 responses for their survey of Americans from all 50 states. They confirmed that we do attach some biases to lifestyles and that some of those biases varied along partisan lines, while others did not.

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