Does Reputation Matter? : Investigating candidate’s occupational reputation and electoral success.

Voting plays a key part of any democracy. Voters may vote for candidates, which best represent their interest of share their opinions. However, this assumption supposes that voters have the necessary knowledge to make an informed decision. Candidates in municipal elections, often cannot foster enough resources to sufficiently inform the electorate about their agenda. Thus,such elections, which may be classified as low information elections, see voters, unable to make an informed decision. In many cases, voters get to know the names of candidates, just at the ballot. In order to make an as good as possible choice, voters have to rely on certain cues, derived from the information on the ballot. This information may be age, gender, or political party. In many cases ballots also include occupational information. While certain scholar argue that occupational information does not play any significant role in voter decision-making. Others claim that this statement should be regarded as the most significant cue. In particular as occupations, who reflect a certain reputation may yield higher electoral success than others. This study thus tries to establish whether such a relationship exists. By analyzing a sample of 1420 candidates in German low-information elections, using a simple regression model, it can be seen that occupational information does not influence electoral success. Furthermore, that there is no clear relationship between the reputation of an occupation and electoral success. Party affiliation, however do display such a relationship.