It's My Campaign I'll Cry if I Want to: How and When Campaigns Use Emotional Appeals

Abstract

Recent research in the arena of campaign advertising suggests that emotional appeals can influence political attitudes, electoral choices and decision-making processes (Brader 2006;Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen 2000; Redlawsk, Civettini and Lau 2007). Yet is there any evidence that candidates use emotional appeals strategically during campaigns? Is there a pattern to their use? For instance, are fear appeals used primarily late in the campaign by trailing candidates in order to get voters to rethink their choices? And are enthusiasm appeals more common early on in order to shore up a candidate's base? In this research we develop a theory that explains when candidates use certain emotional appeals (e.g., anger, enthusiasm, fear and compassion) and which types of candidates are most likely to do so. We then test these ideas using campaign advertising data from several U.S. Senate races from 2004. Our research thus provides a link between research on campaign decision-making-here the decision to "go emotional"-and research focusing on the effects of emotional appeals on voters.

On Different Sides: Investigating the Persuasive Effects of Anger Expression in Political News Messages

“…The moderating role of a priori attitudes found in Experiment 2 suggests as much. Corroborating evidence comes from an experimental study that found a strong effect of an anger‐inducement manipulation on a measure of political participation (Valentino et al, , Study 1, see also Marcus et al, ; Ridout & Searles, ). However, the present results suggest that expressing anger can be a double‐edged sword.…”

Donald Trump, Populism, and the Age of Extremes: Comparing the Personality Traits and Campaigning Styles of Trump and Other Leaders Worldwide

“…With this in mind, are the candidates’ personality profiles associated with their use of negativity and emotionality? Research on the strategic reasons for competing candidates to go negative (and emotional) is widespread (e.g., Nai and Walter ; Ridout and Searles ), but virtually nothing is known about whether campaigning is also driven by the personality of candidates. And yet, good reasons exist that it should, as growing evidence suggests that personality and communication behavior are strongly associated (de Vries et al ).…”

“…On the one hand, if the electoral effectiveness of negative campaigning techniques is still contested (Lau, Sigelman, and Rovner 2007), mounting evidence seems to suggest that negativity is associated with unintentional systemic effects, for instance, depressed turnout and mobilization (Ansolabehere and Iyengar 1995) or increased cynicism, apathy, and a gloomier public mood (Yoon, Pinkleton, and Ko 2005). On the other hand, the use of emotional elements in campaigning (Brader 2006;Ridout and Searles 2011) starts from the assumption that feelings and emotions act as powerful determinants of attitudinal behavior (Marcus and MacKuen 1993;Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000): anxious citizens are likely to pay more attention to information and campaigns, which makes them easier targets for persuasion (Nai, Schemeil, and Marie 2017); enthusiastic citizens are more likely to get invested and participate (Marcus and MacKuen, 1993), but they do so by relying strongly on their previously held partisan beliefs and attitudes (Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000).…”

The Mobilizing Effect of Parties' Moral Rhetoric

“…Another reason that I focus on positive emotions is that parties engage in more positive campaigning than negative campaigning to target copartisan voters. Studies in the United States show that positive ads are more effective than negative ads for mobilization (Brader ) and that parties use enthusiastic appeals to mobilize the base (Ridout and Searles ). In addition, on page 9 of the supporting information (SI), I show that the campaign texts I analyze in the empirical section contain only a few negative moral appeals.…”