Political persuasion relies on emotion. Emotions grab people’s attention and can be a starting point for changing minds. Positive emotions tend to reinforce standing dispositions and encourage us to proceed as usual, but often politics and political science research involve negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, disgust, and shame. Where anxiety leads people to consider new information, most research suggests that anger does not facilitate this process of reconsideration and thus can make persuasion more difficult. Emotions like anger, shame, and enthusiasm all underlie the decision to participate in politics and can motivate voting while hatred can lead to support for violence. The chapter ends by considering how different research designs can uncover the effects of multiple, competing emotions, how emotions matter in small group discussion and how emotions color the acceptance of news.

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Using multiple large national surveys, we investigate how the relationship between policy-based ideology and vote choice in presidential elections differs across demographic groups. Specifically, we consider three key demographic characteristics: race, education, and gender. We find that large differences exist in the way ideology relates to presidential vote for voters from different racial groups. By contrast, we find quite small differences in this relationship when separating voters by education level. Perhaps most surprisingly, whereas men are on average more conservative than women, the relationship between ideology and presidential vote is estimated to be almost exactly the same for the two genders. The large sample sizes we employ allow for relatively precise estimation of these relationships even among our various demographic subsamples and these findings hold similarly across several recent presidential elections.

Since the early 2000s, an array of experimental research has demonstrated that face-to-face canvassing is the most effective form of get-out-the-vote campaigning. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that text messaging can also have powerful mobilization effects. Can the effects of text messaging match those of canvassing? We present a field experiment gauging the effects of text messaging, canvassing, mail, and phone calls among medium propensity evangelical Christian voters in three California battleground congressional districts for the 2018 midterm election. The results show significant turnout effects associated with texting as well as any form of outreach followed by a late-October text message. This challenges the widely held notion that personalized contacting is required to get voters to the polls; rather, we find that peripheral voters—often targeted by campaigns for mobilization—may be receptive to anonymous but timely outreach.