Emotions, Campaigns, and Political Participation

Abstract

There has been a scarcity of work examining the political consequences of discrete emotions. This article examines the political effects of several emotions—anger, sadness, fear, and enthusiasm. Emotional ads should influence whether voters become politically active. To test this, two experiments were administered. The first examines emotional responses to campaign messages; the second tests whether emotions influence political participation. The results indicate anger is mobilizing, by increasing participatory intentions and factors related to participate. This result is then replicated using ad-tracking data. The findings indicate that emotions are an important factor in studying campaign effects.

Building a Tower of Babel? Integrating Core Motivations and Features of Social Structure into the Political Psychology of Political Action

“…Brader and Marcus () suggested recently that three distinct emotions really matter in U.S. politics: Anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm (see also Marcus, ; Valentino, Brader, Groenendyk, Gregorowicz, & Hutchings, ). For example, Weber () manipulated which personal emotion (e.g., anger, sadness) was evoked with respect to crime in the United States. Although this emotion manipulation was purposefully confounded to maximize systematic variance (that is, not completely standardized across conditions), Weber () found that personal anger (in this specific condition about drugs‐related crime) stimulated political action such as campaign volunteering.…”

“…For example, Weber () manipulated which personal emotion (e.g., anger, sadness) was evoked with respect to crime in the United States. Although this emotion manipulation was purposefully confounded to maximize systematic variance (that is, not completely standardized across conditions), Weber () found that personal anger (in this specific condition about drugs‐related crime) stimulated political action such as campaign volunteering. Similarly, Valentino et al () found that personal anger mobilized individuals to vote across experimental, survey, and ANES (American National Election Studies) data, and Groenendyk and Banks (2013) found that personal anger predicted political action in an experiment and two different parts of the ANES database.…”

The curious, context‐dependent case of anger: Explaining voting intentions in three different national elections

“…Our findings may also have practical implications. For one, our findings suggest that those seeking to increase turnout in national elections should make use of party identification and efficacy in their electoral campaigns and political discourse and communication (e.g., Klandermans, ; Weber, ). It is less clear whether political communicators and campaigners should also make use of anger to this end, but at the very least they should be considering what the “right” target of anger would be in the given context.…”

“…Outgroup‐directed anger (e.g., anger targeting the government, authorities, or advantaged group in society) plays a prominent role in explaining why people protest, but little is known about the potential of such anger to motivate voting in national elections (cf. Garry, ; Gerber & Rogers, ; Valentino, Brader, Groenendyk, Gregorowicz, & Hutchings, ; Weber, ). It is important to know more about this unknown motivational potential of anger because this potentially provides new insights into the psychology of voting turnout.…”

Far from reach but near at hand: The role of social media for cross-national mobilization

“…In a study of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, anger was found to mobilize political participation (Valentino, Brader, Groenendyk, Gregorowicz, & Hutchings, 2011). Examining the political effects of several emotions, Weber (2013) documented that anger enhances participatory intentions. These studies on the effect of emotion on behavior lend plausibility to the idea that emotion may motivate activities on social media.…”