Testing the person-positivity bias in a political context: Voters’ affective responses to (non-)personalized individual political actors versus collective political actors

Abstract

The person-positivity bias states that evaluations of real-life individuals are more positive compared to evaluations of collectivities or impersonal objects. This paper aims to test the prevalence of a person-positivity bias in a political context in two respects: (1) we examine whether voters develop stronger negative affective reactions towards other-minded collective actors (i.e. political parties) compared to individual actors (i.e. politicians), and (2) we investigate whether the provision of personalized individuating information tempers the development of negative feelings towards politicians. A survey experiment conducted among a representative sample of the Flemish population (N = 1200) reveals patterns of vertical affective polarization. However, our study did not find significant evidence that voters dislike other-minded collective actors more than other-minded individual politicians. Also the extent to which individual MPs are personalized has little effect on voters' affective evaluations. Taken together, this study highlights that ideological (dis)agreement is primarily steering voters’ evaluation of political actors.