information, update their preferences, and hold politicians accountable in the modern polarized era. He is the co-author of Citizens of the World: Political Engagement and Policy Attitudes of Millennials across the Globe (2023). His other work has been featured in The Journal of Politics, Public Administration Review, Political Behavior, American Politics Research, Electoral Studies, Gender & Politics, Politics, Groups, & Identities, and The Journal of Experimental Political Science, among others.
McDonald applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Feeling Their Pain: Why Voters Want Leaders Who Care, and reported the following:
Readers of Feeling Their Pain: Why Voters want Leaders Who Care will be bewildered if they flip directly to page 99. They will find a random page out of the technical appendix in chapter 3, which has some fairly obscure information regarding an experiment that is described in the chapter.Learn more about Feeling Their Pain at the Oxford University Press website.
A reader flipping to this page might gain some useful knowledge about the book. They would discern that it is an empirical research book, one in which arguments are not simply supported with cherry-picked anecdotes but tested rigorously. Yet they would fail to understand the primary purpose of the book, and furthermore might erroneously assume that the book is too dense and too technical for the average person to understand. Technical appendices are used so that the main text of the chapter can focus on the non-technical substance and convey findings to a broad audience.
Those willing to read the entire book (or even all of Chapter 3) would find evidence not only that voters want compassionate leaders (as the book’s title suggests), but an explanation for why voters view some politicians as empathetic while others are “aloof” or “unfeeling.” In an era where candidates communicate directly to voters via social media and often emphasize aspects of their personality or background, campaign messaging is more important than ever.
My core argument is that voters believe politicians “care about people like them” if they identify a commonality that suggests those politicians can walk a mile in their shoes. This could be a shared experience, such as when Joe Biden related to Gold Star Families by discussing the loss of his son Beau, who had served in the U.S. military. It could be a shared emotion, such as when Donald Trump connected with white working-class voters with a sense of anger toward status quo politics. Or it could be a shared identity, such as race, gender, or religion.
The best way to make this case is by asking people to rate how they feel about candidates for office who either share or lack these commonalities. That means using experiments, and the skeptical reader will want to know how those experiments were run. Hence the technical appendix.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
