Emotions and Affective Polarization: How Enthusiasm and Anxiety About Presidential Candidates Affect Interparty Attitudes

McLaughlin, Bryan; Holland, Derrick; Thompson, Bailey; Koenig, Abby

doi:10.1177/1532673x19891423

Cited by 18 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This can potentially lead to a strengthening of already held attitudes as well as increased levels of affective polarization. Even though partisans do not seem to react negatively to outgroup messages, increased positive affect towards the own party has been found to foster higher levels of affective polarization (McLaughlin et al, 2020 ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, Hope, and COVID‐19: Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Widmann

2022

Political Psychology

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Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID‐19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties' position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word embeddings and neural network classifiers to measure fear and hope appeals in social media messages of political parties in four European countries. Furthermore, I rely on more than 1,400,000 public tweets of random citizens to estimate the impact of party messages. To do so, I employ vector autoregression (VAR) analysis to compare retweet volumes of political messages to emotional expressions in public tweets. Results indicate two main findings, (1) populist radical parties communicate less about the pandemic and decrease fear and increase hope appeals while COVID case numbers are rising whereas government parties exhibit the opposite pattern; (2) increased diffusion of party tweets consistently precedes change in partisans' emotional expressions the following day. The findings can carry important implications for (affective) polarization and the level of protective behavior among the population.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, Hope, and COVID‐19: Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Widmann

2022

Political Psychology

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“…Jacobson (2019) found a robust relationship between feeling thermometer ratings of the president and his political party. McLaughlin et al (2020) find that voters’ emotional responses to presidential candidates are correlated with their affect toward the parties. The affective linkage between presidents, candidates, and their parties was particularly pronounced during this period.…”

Section: Presidential Pulse Of Party Politicsmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Presidents and presidential candidates are an important source cue for the public's attitudes toward the political parties (Jacobson, 2019;Nicholson, 2012). Presidential politics can influence both beliefs about the party's ideological positions (Brasher, 2009;Dancey et al, 2019;Jacobson, 2019) and partisan polarization (Nicholson, 2012;McLaughlin et al, 2020;Smidt 2020). Presidential politics is also closely linked with vote choice and election outcomes in both federal-and state-level contests (Sievert & McKee, 2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

Sievert

Hinojosa

2022

American Politics Research

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Presidents and presidential candidates serve as an important source cue for the mass public’s attitudes toward and evaluations of the political parties. Our study evaluates these dynamics during the transition from a lame duck president, Barack Obama, to a new party standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Our analysis takes advantage of the fact that the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative Election Study (CES) and the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) surveys asked respondents to evaluate both Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party. These data allow us to examine whether the transition from Obama to Clinton changed the primary referent for public attitudes toward the Democratic Party. Our results provide mixed evidence about a change in the relative importance of attitudes toward Clinton and Obama when the former became the nominee, and the latter was a lame duck. While the public’s view of the connection between Obama and Democratic Party’s ideological profile remained constant across time, respondents did update their affective assessments of the party in the face of a new party leader once Clinton was the nominee.

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“…People tend to seek information that may bring pleasure to them, and such a tendency may be much more salient when people can use the Internet to choose their information source (e.g., De los Santos & Nabi, 2019). Similarly, both the in-group enthusiasm and the out-group anxiety play an important role in the political polarization and information seeking in the political domain (Lyons & Sokhey, 2014; McLaughlin et al, 2020).…”

Section: The Integrated Model Of Information Seeking Fc and Social Me...mentioning

confidence: 99%

PM Me the Truth? The Conditional Effectiveness of Fact-Checks Across Social Media Sites

Wang

2022

Social Media + Society

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People use multiple social media daily. Some platforms feature public interactions like Facebook, others emphasize private communications such as Line. Although misinformation is rampant on all platforms, literature on fact-checks (FC) focuses primarily on public ones. This article provides an integrated psychological model and argues that FC is less effective on private platforms. People expect to encounter “unwelcome” FCs (incongruent with their beliefs) on public platforms, but selectively approach the “welcome” FC on private platforms. An experiment ( n = 601) and a national survey ( n = 1060) were implemented to test these hypotheses in the 2020 Taiwan Presidential Election. The experiment shows that respondents prefer FC on Line, which helps their party, but prefer FC on Facebook which disadvantages their party. The survey shows that consuming FC with more private platform usage has lower media literacy, while is the opposite on public platforms. Future work should focus on both FC and how it is consumed.

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Emotions and Affective Polarization: How Enthusiasm and Anxiety About Presidential Candidates Affect Interparty Attitudes

Cited by 18 publications

References 24 publications

Fear, Hope, and COVID‐19: Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Fear, Hope, and COVID‐19: Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

PM Me the Truth? The Conditional Effectiveness of Fact-Checks Across Social Media Sites

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