Conflict and Candidate Selection: Game Framing Voter Choice

Political campaigns are often likened to a game typified by conflict. We consider whether using a conflict frame visually emphasizing the contested aspect of partisanship affects candidate support in the 2016 presidential election. Using a nationwide survey experiment (N = 975) that randomly assigns participants to different visual frames depicting politics as conflictual or process-based, we find that participants exposed to the conflict frame show significantly higher odds of supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, while rejecting Hillary Clinton. The conflicting frame also increases self-reported participant anger, which decomposition analysis shows increases support for Trump and Sanders while decreasing it for Clinton (and that we offer as a preliminary finding). Avenues for future research are then considered