Who would Darth Vader vote for?

By Stephen Beech

People think Darth Vader would vote for the rivals to the political party they support, according to new research.

They believe that fictional "goodies" - such as Harry Potter, Spider-Man and Gandalf - would vote the same way they do.

But they think big screen villains - such as Star Wars Sith Lord Vader, Cruella de Vill and Games of Thrones' Joffrey Baratheon - would vote for the rival party.

The study, published in the journal Political Science Research and Method, shows how people in the UK and USA believe that fictional characters they admire would share their voting preferences, while those they dislike would vote the other way.

Researchers from the University of Southampton also found that around one in six people recalled the party affiliation of a charitable or corrupt politician in a news story, despite it not being revealed.

Again, people thought the "good" politician was from their party, while the "bad" one was from the party they opposed.

Researchers say such "political projection" could be fuelling polarisation in politics.

Study leader Dr. Stuart Turnbull-Dugarte, from the University of Southampton, said: “If we see ‘villains’ as belonging to the other side, then we also tend to associate more and more negative attributes with that group.

“This is not only bad news for polarization, but also makes us more easily susceptible to misinformation that confirms the existing biases we hold about the voters of certain parties.”

In the first of two studies, researchers from the University of Southampton and the University of Vienna in Austria surveyed 3,200 people in the UK and USA - 1,600 from each country.

In a series of questions, people were presented with two familiar characters from popular franchises including the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney, Harry Potter, Star Wars., Lord of the Rings and Games of Thrones

They were asked which character they thought was more likely to vote Labour or Conservative, in the UK, or Democrat or Republican, in the US.

The answers were then cross-referenced with information about the respondents’ political leanings and affiliations.

People were 20% more likely to project their own politics onto a hero than a villain.

The effect was equally strong when assigning opposition politics to a villain, with participants also 20% more likely to say a villain would vote for the opposing party than their own.

In the second study, around 1,600 people in the UK were shown one of two contrasting news stories about a local councilor: one in which the councilor donated money to a local charity and another in which they’d stolen money from the charity.

The participants were then asked questions about the story they had read, including one about which party the councilor represented - information that was missing in both stories.

Around one in six people falsely "remembered" which party the councilor represented, with a strong tendency to see the charitable donor as a member of their party, and the thief as a member of their rival party.

When people who said they didn’t know or didn’t recall seeing the information were asked to guess, they also did so along partisan lines.

Dr. Turnbull-Dugarte said: “People believe heroes are more likely to belong to their group but can accept a proportion might not.

"Respondents were much more consistent when identifying a villain as belonging to the other group.

“In a context where polarisation is high, projection appears to be more about defining who we are not, than who we are.”

The tendency to see heroes on their side and villains on the opposite was greater amongst those with stronger political identities.

Those on the political left were also more inclined to do so than those on the right, according to the findings.

Dr. Turnbull-Dugarte added: “To overcome increasing political division, we need to recognize this tendency to project heroic and villainous traits along partisan lines and recognize that reality is always more complex and nuanced than our biases would have us believe.”