Political Science Research and Methods
What electability means to voters and how it affects their decisions
2026-06-15
Voters must often resolve dilemmas between choosing their favorite candidate and the one likeliest to win an election. Researchers know surprisingly little about how voters even conceptualize electability, let alone make these decisions. We use two novel survey experiments to evaluate how voters trade off policy agreement and electability in their decisions. The first experiment presents respondents with policy agreement between themselves and candidates and candidates’ electability rankings on the same scale, allowing us to directly compare. We show that while making electability information salient modestly reduces support for candidates with limited prospects, respondents remain primarily policy-motivated. Additionally, we show that respondents actually construe electability as a signal about a candidate’s qualifications rather than as a signal about getting votes.