It’s My Party, I’ll Endorse If I Want To:

This experimental study examines the impact of endorsements by party elites with a primary election for the U.S. Senate.  This experiment used a pretest-posttest design to identify and measure an endorsement’s effect on participants’ evaluations of the endorsed primary candidate and the unendorsed primary candidate, as well as their evaluations of the endorser and their political party.  Results showed that such endorsements impacted participants’ assessments of both the endorsed and unendorsed candidates, while the impact on perceptions of their political party approached a level of significance. Implications of these results are discussed, and recommendations for future research initiatives are presented.