Revisiting name recognition and candidate support: Experimental tests of the mere exposure hypothesis

Abstract

Often lacking adequate information to guide their votes, voters may be susceptible to subtle psychological influences, including name recognition. For decades, scholars have found that voters are more likely to cast ballots for candidates whose names they recognize. These arguments imply that exposure to little-known candidates’ names increases electoral support. But research has seldom demonstrated a causal effect consistent with this “mere exposure” hypothesis, particularly under real-world conditions. We conduct three sets of experiments exposing subjects to the names of challengers in a range of electoral contexts across the United States. Results yield little support for the hypothesis that exposure increases electoral support. As name recognition may be insufficient without party labels, we also conduct experiments providing the candidates’ party affiliations, again finding little evidence of an effect. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that candidates, particularly challengers, who merely make their names known will thereby win more votes.

Keywords

mere exposure name recognition name ID campaigns political advertising recognition heuristic

When voters glance down at their ballots, they often operate with little information. They are rarely able to recall issue stances taken by presidential (Freeder et al., 2019) or U.S. House candidates (Krasno, 1994). When considering most state or local candidates, voters have even less information on which to base their choices (Parker, 1981; Partin, 2001). In such instances, they may be susceptible to factors of dubious substantive relevance, such as ballot order (Koppell and Steen, 2004) and polling location (Berger et al., 2008).

Somewhere between substantively dubious and substantively meaningful is name recognition. With little else to go on, voters may reasonably cast a ballot for the candidate whose name is recognizable (Kam and Zechmeister, 2013), which may explain why recognizable candidates tend to receive larger vote shares (Elms and Sniderman, 2006; Jacobson, 2006; Jacobson and Carson, 2015; Mann and Wolfinger, 1980; Ragsdale, 1981). Name recognition has been offered as an explanation for the electoral advantage of incumbents, who enjoyed 37 percentage points higher name recognition on average than challengers among voters in U.S. House elections between 1980 and 2012 (Jacobson and Carson, 2015: 159).¹ It is also routinely discussed by political commentators: “Typically, an incumbent would not like to debate his opponent at all, because you don’t want to raise their name ID and give them attention” (Delfino, 2024). In earlier work, we make a similar point, suggesting that get-out-the-vote messages that mention the candidates are more beneficial for obscure challengers than incumbents (Panagopoulos and Green, 2008: 166).

Aside from the studies of Kam and Zechmeister (2013), however, there is no direct experimental evidence showing that interventions designed to increase candidates’ name recognition also increase vote share. Moreover, no study, to our knowledge, examines the effect of mere exposure in the context of actual state or federal elections. We seek to fill this gap using survey experiments under conditions that are more naturalistic than the laboratory but still propitious for a mere exposure effect. Many of our experiments focus on prominent but low-information races, such as U.S. House and down-ballot statewide races, all of which involve an incumbent fending off a relatively unknown challenger. In these experiments, telephone- and internet-based survey questions expose participants to the name of a major-party challenger in an actual upcoming race. The treatments are designed to mention the challengers’ names explicitly, which presumably heightens familiarity and conscious awareness of the challenger. If name recognition is causative, this heightened familiarity will translate into greater support for the challenger.

As a preview, we find no effect for mere exposure on electoral support. We test if its effect is enhanced by combining exposure to names with information on the candidates’ party affiliations. Adding party labels does not change the results. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that candidates, particularly challengers, who merely make their names known will thereby win more votes. We conjecture that the positive correlation between name recognition and electoral support stems from the fact that candidates with higher name recognition tend to also have more money, experience, and other signals of quality and popularity.

Existing research on the effects of name recognition

Though name recognizability and electoral support are correlated, it is unknown whether the two are causally linked. Their relationship may be confounded by unmeasured aspects of the candidates and their campaigns. One possibility is that higher-quality candidates simply have greater access to campaign resources that they use to enhance their name recognition. Another possibility is that name recognition truly affects the propensity to vote for a candidate. The recognition heuristic, a variant of the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman, 1973) and a descendent of the “mere exposure hypothesis” (Zajonc, 1968), suggests people prefer recognized objects over unrecognized ones (Gigerenzer and Goldstein, 2011). Prior exposure to a stimulus object facilitates easier subsequent processing of it, which leads people to misconstrue such “perceptual fluency” as their (positive) affective reaction (Schwarz et al., 2007; Zajonc, 2001). Exposure alone can thereby increase positive feelings toward a stimulus object (Weaver et al., 2007; Zajonc, 2001). Such an effect echoes Stokes and Miller’s (1962: 541) conclusion: “recognition carries a positive valence: to be perceived at all is to be perceived favorably.” Decades later, Kam and Zechmeister (2013) explored the recognition heuristic in the lab. They exposed subjects to a hypothetical candidate’s name subliminally, by flashing it on a computer screen for 40 milliseconds over the course of numerous trials. This repeated subliminal exposure to the candidate’s name increased his vote share substantially, by 10 to 13 percentage points.

These findings accord with hundreds of studies that investigate the mere exposure hypothesis in nonpolitical contexts (Bornstein and Craver-Lemley, 2022; Montoya et al., 2017). Although most of these studies employed meaningless stimuli like shapes, mere exposure has also been found to operate in domains with more meaningful objects. Researchers of consumer behavior have shown mere exposure to brand names guides product preference (e.g., Coates et al. 2006). For example, in one study, subjects who were shown textual ads for fictitious toothpaste brands for 126 seconds over a 50-min period preferred them over non-exposed brands (Baker, 1999). Moreover, in general, consumers tend to prefer products made by recognizable brands (Oeusoonthornwattana and Shanks, 2011; Thoma and Williams, 2013). By whatever channels the mere exposure hypothesis operates, its implication for the evaluation of political candidates in low-salience races is clear: a candidate with a recognizable name is advantaged.

Data and methods

To heighten external validity, we conducted survey experiments during actual elections using real candidates’ names. Institutional review board approval was received for all studies. In all studies, treated subjects were presented with a survey question about a relatively unknown candidate running for office in an upcoming election. For treated subjects, exposure to the candidate’s name is assumed to make it more recognizable. We examine mere exposure to both visual and aural stimuli. In one experiment, the survey question was spoken over the phone; in the other, it was provided in text over the internet. Party affiliation was not mentioned. The inclusion of party affiliation may enhance or supersede mere exposure to the candidate’s name (Kam and Zechmeister, 2013; Thoma and Williams, 2013). We return to this possibility below.

Set of Experiments 1: 2012 congressional elections

These experiments (N = 1619) were administered by telephone on a registration-based sample of registered voters between April 12 and 27, 2012 in seven congressional districts across Illinois (IL-1, IL-3, and IL-10), Maryland (MD-3 and MD-6), and Pennsylvania (PA-10 and PA-12). We selected districts in which incumbents were seeking reelection against relatively unknown challengers. The challenger’s name was revealed in the context of a favorability question near the beginning of the survey. Respondents were subsequently asked a series of unrelated questions. At the end, they were asked a trial-heat question: “Suppose you will vote in the November 2012 election for U.S. House of Representatives in your district and that the only two candidates on the ballot are [incumbent] and [challenger]. Who would you vote for?”

We compare the proportions voting for the challenger in the control and treatment conditions within each district. As a summary test, we pool respondents from all districts and estimate a fixed-effects linear regression predicting probability of voting for the challenger (see logistic regressions in Appendix Tables A8 and A9). To detect an effect size on par with Kam and Zechmeister’s laboratory results (2013), our pooled test has a power of 0.99. For an effect half as large, the pooled test maintains a power of 0.76 (see Appendix C).

Results

Among subjects in these experiments, 68.9% indicated they had never heard of the challenger, providing ample opportunity for name-recognition effects.² In Table 1, we present the proportions voting for the challenger in the control and treatment conditions for each congressional district. Contrary to the mere exposure hypothesis, in no case is the challenger’s vote share among the treated significantly higher than among the control, and in five districts the challenger’s vote share is lower, though not significantly so. The results of the linear regression pooling all seven districts corroborate these null findings. The estimate of the average treatment effect is positive but close to zero and statistically insignificant, with a Bayes factor of 0.058, which favors the null hypothesis (see Table 2).

Table 1.

Estimated effects of name recognition on congressional challenger’s vote share.

District	N	Never heard of challenger	Control vote share	Treatment vote share	Difference
MD-6	133	0.229	0.685	0.682	−0.003 [−0.219, 0.213]
PA-12	140	0.581	0.596	0.548	−0.048 [−0.267, 0.171]
IL-10	333	0.644	0.424	0.476	0.052 [−0.060, 0.165]
IL-1	438	0.700	0.364	0.321	−0.043 [−0.137, 0.051]
IL-3	301	0.756	0.368	0.356	−0.012 [−0.128, 0.103]
MD-3	139	0.828	0.699	0.694	−0.005 [−0.184, 0.175]
PA-10	135	0.862	0.541	0.708	0.167 [−0.062, 0.397]

Note: Challengers' vote shares and shares reporting never having heard of the challenger. 95% confidence intervals in brackets.

Table 2.

Regression estimates of the effects of name recognition on congressional challenger’s vote preference.

	Estimate	p-Value	Bayes factor
Name treatment	0.002 (0.026)	0.940	0.058
N	1619
Adj. R²	0.064

Note: Estimates from a linear regression predicting probability of voting for the challenger. Model includes fixed effects for congressional district. Standard errors in parentheses. Bayes factors smaller than 1 indicate stronger support for the null hypothesis. Full regression estimates are in Appendix Table A1.

Set of Experiments 2: 2012 Republican presidential primary election

We contracted with YouGov/Polimetrix to field a quota-matched internet-based survey experiment, between August 26 and September 12, 2011, early in the 2012 Republican presidential primary. Half of the sample comprised an oversample of Latinos. We randomly varied the inclusion of three candidates’ names in one of two versions of a stimulus question. The three names were drawn from six obscure candidates in the race at the time: Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, Buddy Roemer, and Rick Santorum. One version of the stimulus was a list of feeling thermometer items that included three randomly selected candidates, along with Barack Obama and John Boehner. The other version asked how much attention the respondent had been paying to the race and included three randomly selected candidates’ names, along with Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin (see Appendix B for wording). After a series of unrelated questions, respondents were asked whom they would vote for and who their second choice was. The list for first choice contained all the candidates’ names; the second-choice list omitted the name selected as first choice. In contrast to the previous experiments which exposed subjects to challengers’ names aurally, this does so visually.

Results

In Table 3, we present the proportions choosing each candidate as their first or second choice. Nearly all the differences are small and non-significant, with only one exceeding two percentage points. Two of the six are in the wrong direction. One candidate, Buddy Roemer, receives a significant 3.5 percentage-point boost (see Appendix D for a brief discussion). Based on the pooled regression, we conclude that the preponderance of the evidence from this experiment accords with the previous, indicating negligible electoral benefit of name recognition.³

Table 3.

Estimated effects of name recognition and first or second choice in 2012 GOP presidential primary.

Candidate	N_Treated	Control vote share	Treatment vote share	Difference	Bayes factor
Bachmann	829	0.265	0.257	−0.008 [−0.052, 0.037]	0.058
Cain	784	0.225	0.223	−0.002 [−0.044, 0.040]	0.075
Huntsman	812	0.263	0.252	−0.011 [−0.054, 0.034]	0.080
Perry	789	0.350	0.362	0.012 [−0.036, 0.061]	0.075
Roemer	771	0.121	0.156	0.035 [0.0001, 0.070]	0.711
Santorum	815	0.208	0.195	−0.013 [−0.053, 0.028]	0.095
N _Total	1600

Note: Proportions reporting candidate as their first choice or second choice for Republican presidential nominee. 95% confidence intervals for differences in proportions in brackets. Bayes factors smaller than 1 indicate stronger support for the null hypothesis.

Name recognition in combination with other information

The results above suggest that name recognizability is not sufficient to improve electoral performance. In combination with other information, however, name recognition may operate differently. Some argue that name recognition should be more influential when there is little other information for voters to go on, such as party, incumbency, race, ethnicity, or gender (Kam and Zechmeister, 2013; Oeusoonthornwattana and Shanks, 2011). In that case, the findings from the previous section suggest no effect of name recognition even under those favorable conditions. Alternatively, name recognition may boost the effect of other candidate attributes, such as their party affiliation. Voters are less likely to defect when they recognize their party’s candidate (Jacobson and Carson, 2015: 160) in part because they may infer candidates’ policy stances and priorities (Dancey and Sheagley, 2013).

Name recognition with party labels

Set of Experiments 3: Congressional, secretary of state, and attorney general elections

We analyze three additional experiments to test the effect of name recognition when party affiliation is given, including two from down-ballot statewide races. These experiments differ in ways that help broaden the generalizability of our findings. Candidates in down-ballot statewide races tend to be even less familiar to voters than members of Congress (Jacobson and Carson, 2015; Parker, 1981).⁴

The first set of experiments comes from an arm of Experiment 1 that added to the stimulus the phrase “the Republican” or “the Democrat” after the challenger’s name.⁵ We supplement this with two additional experiments that used similarly designed stimuli and measures. One was conducted during the 2018 general election race for Massachusetts’s state treasurer (N = 716) and the other during the 2011 general election for Kentucky’s attorney general (N = 601). Both were administered by telephone.

Table 4.

Insignificant effects of name recognition with party label on challenger’s vote share.

Office	N	Never heard of challenger	Control vote share	Treatment vote share	Difference
MD-6	297	0.231	0.656	0.727	0.071 [−0.050, 0.193]
IL-10	315	0.456	0.444	0.463	0.019 [−0.062, 0.099]
PA-12	274	0.531	0.585	0.548	−0.071 [−0.217, 0.075]
IL-1	840	0.566	0.370	0.336	−0.034 [−0.101, 0.037]
IL-3	668	0.595	0.387	0.402	0.015 [−0.063, 0.092]
KY AG	601	0.644	0.490	0.495	0.005 [−0.078, 0.088]
MD-3	290	0.692	0.689	0.756	0.067 [−0.055, 0.190]
PA-10	294	0.757	0.589	0.629	0.04 [−0.100, 0.179]
MA ST	716	—	0.413	0.433	0.020 [−0.054, 0.096]

Note: Challengers' vote shares and shares reporting never having heard of the challenger. MA ST is the 2018 Massachusetts state treasurer race. KY AG refers to the 2011 Kentucky contest for attorney general. 95% confidence intervals for difference in proportions in brackets.

Results

As above, we see mostly small positive differences in the challengers’ vote shares across the congressional districts and again in the state elections in Massachusetts and Kentucky (see Table 4). None of the estimates are statistically significant at conventional levels. To investigate further, we estimated another pooled linear regression (N = 4617). Table 5 reports a positive but insignificant estimated average treatment effect (BF = 0.039). Taken as a whole, we interpret these findings to imply that exposure to candidates’ names in conjunction with party labels did not meaningfully boost voters’ propensity to support them.

Table 5.

Regression estimates of the effects of name recognition with party label on Congressional challenger’s vote preference.

	Estimate	p-Value	Bayes factor
Name treatment	0.009 (0.015)	0.550	0.039
N	4617
Adj. R²	0.049

Note: Estimates from a linear regression predicting probability of voting for the challenger. Model includes fixed effects for election. Standard errors in parentheses. Full regression estimates in Appendix Table A2.

Stronger effects among co-partisans or low-information voters?

The null average treatment effects we observe may hide heterogeneous treatment effects among certain subgroups. We investigate two possibilities: whether challengers’ co-partisans or low-information voters are more strongly affected by name recognition. Co-partisans of the challenger may be more sensitive to mere name exposure because they are already disinclined to vote for the incumbent and inclined toward the challenger. A nudge toward the challenger may be especially effective. Similarly, low-information voters are likely less attached to the incumbent and more susceptible to transient signals in the political environment. To test these possibilities, we estimate two new models, one interacting the treatment with an indicator for shared partisanship with the challenger and another with an indicator for having a bachelor’s degree or higher. As reported in Appendix Tables A5 and A6, we find no evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects. We concede, however, that our experimental protocols preclude us from probing whether there exists heterogeneity in the impact of the treatment based on subjects’ ex ante preferences or familiarity with the candidates because subjects in our control conditions were not probed about these items. In Appendix Table A7, we explore this possibility by testing whether treatment effects differ based on election, as the challengers in some elections were much less well known than in others. We find none of the effects significantly differ from that of the baseline, IL-1, a district that was typical for its level of challenger obscurity (M_All = 64% never heard of challenger, M_IL-1 = 70%). Subsequent research that sheds light on these questions can potentially refine the scope conditions in which treatment effects may obtain.

Discussion and conclusion

In an era of celebrity candidates and vast amounts of money invested to boost visibility of political candidates, the benefits of name recognition appear to be commonsense. However, the name recognition hypothesis has remained largely untested in real-world elections. In their pathbreaking work, Kam and Zechmeister (2013) demonstrated that repeated subliminal exposure to a hypothetical candidate’s name raised his vote share. In our study, we sought to examine whether an effect of name recognition obtained in more naturalistic settings. Subjects heard or read a candidate’s name in a survey, and the names belonged to real, relatively unknown challengers facing an incumbent. We expected exposure to challengers’ names to make their names more recognizable and lead more subjects to vote for them. No such effect reliably materialized. If visibility helps political candidates in elections, we conjecture it is likely because it conveys other information voters use to make inferences about the candidates (Oppenheimer, 2003), akin to the “indirect causal pathway” proposed by Kam and Zechmeister (2013: 973).

Our null results do not support the mere exposure hypothesis in political campaigns and contradict some of the findings of Kam and Zechmeister (2013). These inconsistencies may be due to differences in experimental design. One notable difference is we provided overt exposure to the challengers’ names, to better mimic how voters may be incidentally exposed to candidates’ names in the real world. Meta-analysis of mere exposure research has found the effect to be weaker when subjects are aware of the stimulus (Montoya et al., 2017: 468). However, our results do comport with some of those of Kam and Zechmeister (2013). They find, as we do, that the effect of mere exposure fails to materialize when one of the candidates is an incumbent. Providing additional information about the quality of the other candidate seems enough to undo the benefit of name recognition. Experiments in consumer behavior have discovered a similar pattern. The effect of mere exposure to an unknown brand of product disappears when pitted against a well-known competitor (Baker, 1999). Supporting this view, recent research argues that the mere exposure effect is driven by the relative salience of an object over another (Mrkva and Van Boven, 2020). Even with an experimentally provided exposure, the challenger’s name is likely still less relatively salient to subjects than the incumbent’s. It is worth emphasizing, however, that we fail to find mere exposure aids candidates in an open presidential primary.

That said, our experiments have limitations that can be addressed in subsequent research. One potential criticism is that the treatment is atypical of a mere exposure trial because a phone call from a pollster or an internet survey may be an aversive experience for the respondent, thereby associating the challenger’s name with mild unpleasantness (Zajonc 2001: 226). Had this been the case, we might have found a negative effect, but we found none. Generalizability to other electoral contests is another limitation. Nevertheless, we implemented our studies in settings that varied in terms of salience, from a presidential primary to congressional contests to down-ballot races for attorney general and secretary of state, to be able to say something about the generalizability of the findings and still found no meaningful differences in the impacts of our treatments. Additional research can explore the potential effect of name recognition in races between two (or more) unknown candidates or in even lower-information contests. It is conceivable that name recognition provides more meaningful cues in environments with little other information about the candidates.

Another limitation is that we provide only a single exposure to the challengers’ names. In this sense, our experimental design was intended to test a hypothesis about mere exposure per se, not exposure writ large. Accordingly, our central, null finding—that mere exposure operationalized as such appears ineffective—should not necessarily be extrapolated to all exposure types. It is conceivable, for instance, that a single, recent exposure may not increase support the way repeated, over-time, explicit (or perhaps even a single, recent implicit) exposure can. Admittedly, our study cannot rule out these sorts of effects. We also note that while the theory of mere exposure does not necessarily require multiple stimuli (Bornstein and Craver-Lemley, 2022), we could have asked numerous survey questions about the challenger. We opted against this design in part because we did not want to conflate exposure with quality; the more questions are asked, the more a candidate could appear worthy of asking questions about. While our studies appear to rule out the possibility that a single, supraliminal exposure to challengers’ names is sufficient to raise support for them, it remains an open question whether repeated exposures of this sort would do so. If ineffective, multiple exposures would be especially convincing evidence against the mere exposure hypothesis, since they may also signal quality.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Revisiting name recognition and candidate support: Experimental tests of the mere exposure hypothesis

Supplemental Material for Revisiting name recognition and candidate support: Experimental tests of the mere exposure hypothesis by Costas Panagopoulos, Donald P. Green, and Philip Moniz in Research & Politics

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Costas Panagopoulos

Donald P. Green

Philip Moniz

Funding

The authors received no financial compensation for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Carnegie Corporation of New York grant

This publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

The replication files are available at:

Notes

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