It’s Not Only What you Say, It’s 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. (Downs, 1957;Ansolabehere and Snyder, 2000; Schofield, 2003;Adams, 2001;Adams, Merrill and Grofman, 2005;Adams, Scheiner and Kawasumi, 2016). The second dimension captures campaign focus -whether parties adopt campaign messages that focus on themselves or their opponents (Skaperdas and Grofman, 1995;Lau and Pomper, 2002;Geer, 2006;Elmelund-Praestekaer, 2008Hansen and Pedersen, 2008). One aspect of campaigns that is ignored in this two-dimensional framework is campaign sentiment, which refers to the emotive content of campaigns. Whereas campaign content and campaign focus address what parties say and who they say it about, campaign sentiment addresses how they say it.Scholars are increasingly looking at how the emotive content of campaign messages affects voter behavior Roseman, Abelson and Ewing, 1986;Weber, Searles and Ridout, 2011;Utych, 2018). The common thread in this literature is that voters are not merely influenced by the substantive content of campaigns but also by their emotive content. Studies have repeatedly shown that electoral campaigns can be manipulated to trigger emotional responses that, in turn, produce predictable changes in voter behavior. This raises a natural question. If campaign sentiment influences voter behavior, political actors should be strategic about its use. Are they? To date, there has been little research that explicitly looks at the strategic use of emotion in election campaigns. What research there is tends to focus on the historically majoritarian systems in the United States and the United Kingdom (Ridout and Searles, 2011; Kosmidis et al., Forthcoming). 1 In this article, we examine the strategic use of emotive language in European election campaigns.Studies that look at emotion in campaigns often focus on the use of images and music . However, language can also engender different types of sentiment, such as fear, anxiety, sadness, or optimism (Roseman, Abelson and Ewing, 1986;Pennebaker, 1993;Pennebaker and Francis, 1996). We build on a long tradition that emphasizes...

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