Voter reactions to candidate background characteristics depend on candidate policy positions

Do per­sonal back­ground char­ac­ter­is­tics of a po­lit­i­cal can­di­date af­fect voter eval­u­a­tions when vot­ers also know the can­di­date's pol­icy po­si­tion? Sev­eral stud­ies have shown that vot­ers in­fer per­sonal traits and pol­icy po­si­tions from can­di­date char­ac­ter­is­tics such as gen­der, fam­ily back­ground and oc­cu­pa­tion. How­ever, in most elec­tions, vot­ers do not eval­u­ate can­di­dates ab­sent of any pol­icy in­for­ma­tion. We in­ves­ti­gate whether the in­flu­ence of per­sonal back­ground char­ac­ter­is­tics van­ishes when pol­icy in­for­ma­tion re­gard­ing a can­di­date is avail­able to the vot­ers. Us­ing a sur­vey ex­per­i­ment, we con­firm that vot­ers in­fer both per­sonal traits and pol­icy po­si­tions from the back­ground char­ac­ter­is­tics of a can­di­date, and we fur­ther­more show that ex­plicit in­for­ma­tion on pol­icy po­si­tions mod­er­ates the re­la­tion­ship be­tween back­ground char­ac­ter­is­tics and can­di­date eval­u­a­tions. How­ever, pol­icy in­for­ma­tion does not sim­ply crowd out the ef­fects of can­di­date back­ground char­ac­ter­is­tics. In­stead, pol­icy in­for­ma­tion can change the va­lence of back­ground char­ac­ter­is­tics, turn­ing oth­er­wise dis­ad­van­ta­geous char­ac­ter­is­tics into an elec­toral ad­van­tage.