It Is Not Only What You Say, It Is Also How You Say It: The Strategic Use of Campaign Sentiment

Abstract

What explains the type of electoral campaign run by political parties? We provide a new perspective on campaigns that focuses on the strategic use of emotive language. We argue that the level of positive sentiment parties adopt in their campaigns depends on their incumbency status, their policy position, and objective economic conditions. We test these claims with a novel dataset that captures the emotive language used in over 400 party manifestos across eight European countries. As predicted, we find that incumbent parties, particularly incumbent prime ministerial parties, use more positive sentiment than opposition parties. We find that ideologically moderate parties employ higher levels of positive sentiment than extremist parties. And we find that all parties exhibit lower levels of positive sentiment when the economy is performing poorly but that this negative effect is weaker for incumbents. Our analysis has important implications for research on campaign strategies and retrospective voting.

Does Radical-Right Success Make the Political Debate More Negative? Evidence from Emotional Rhetoric in German State Parliaments

“…On the other hand, our findings are in line with previous research in highlighting how politicians tend to use emotional language strategically (Crabtree et al, 2020;Kosmidis et al, 2019;Müller, 2020). However, our paper adds an important insight to this conclusion.…”

“…The only other party whose MPs use a similarly low amount of positive emotions is the left-populist The Left. This finding is in line with previous research, which has found that populist politicians use positive emotions less often than the mainstream ones (Widmann, 2021), and that the rhetoric of parties far from the ideological center also tends to be less positive (Crabtree et al, 2020). 9 Fig.…”

“…The comparison of the two tables shows that our effects range between around 50% (in the case of pride) and around 100% of the baseline (in the case of hope). As we have noted, previous research has found that mainstream politicians tend to employ a more positive rhetoric than politicians from challenger parties (Crabtree et al, 2020;Widmann, 2021). This might make it harder to find an effect of radical-right success due to ceiling effects.…”

“…In the first place, the effect should be stronger on MPs of mainstream parties than on those of populist parties. Populist politicians of both the left and the right tend to use negative emotions as a ways of mobilizing on discontentment with the establishment (Crabtree et al, 2020)-a finding that has been replicated in the specific case of Germany (Widmann, 2021). As a consequence, unlike with mainstream parties, the increase in negativity brought about by the success of radical-right politicians may actually prove profitable to left populist politicians.…”

“…In the second place, a growing strand of research has investigated the strategic usage of emotional language by political actors (Crabtree et al, 2020;Kosmidis et al, 2019;Müller, 2020). This study contributes to this research field by focusing on an additional factor that explains variation in the use of such language: the success of radical-right candidates.…”