Emotions and Voting in Referendum: The 2018 New Caledonian Referendum

• In Event: Emotions, Political Attitudes and Referendum

Abstract

The hypothesis that citizens’ emotional reactions influence political information-seeking processes and the extent to which voters rely on past practices or decide based on contemporaneous considerations has been well established in the literature. A more recent stream of research has argued that citizens’ emotional reactions have a more powerful role than the one assumed by earlier scholarship. Specifically, anger has been found to motivate risk-seeking and aggressive political choices and candidates while fear has been found to be associated with cautious, risk-averse, and conciliatory preferences. This article applies these recent insights on the role of affect on political choices to explain individual-level differences on voting for or against independence in the November 2018 New Caledonian independence referendum. Drawing on a large scale representative sample we hypothesize that anger should be powerfully associated with voting for independence even among the more vulnerable social strata that may experience significant material losses in the case that New Caledonia became independent. On the other hand, we anticipate that fear should increase the propensity to maintain the extant status quo. The findings advance current knowledge on the impact of emotions on political decision-making and the distinct effects of fear and anger on voting behavior. Further, they provide insights over the role that affective processes play on a particularly understudied yet timely topic, voting behavior on independence referenda.

Authors

• Pavlos Vasilopoulos, CEVIPOF

• Eric Kerrouche, Sciences Po, Bordeaux