Morality versus competence in social perception of political candidates

Over the past 50 years, the experimental social psychology has shown that social actors organize their impressions of their interaction partners around two dimensions: competence and social-morality. Based on recent theoretical and experimental knowledge on the perception of candidates, we conduct two experiments (N=88) analyzing the extent to which these features, central in the perception of political actors, namely morality and competence, are potential determinants of the voting behaviour. The data of the research emphasized that individuals are more sensitive to negative information concerning the morality of politicians than their skills.