Partisan Emotion Work: Parties’ Appeals and Citizens’ Reactions

• In Event: The Biological Dynamics of Political Attitudes and Their Measurement

Abstract

Although the normative gold standard describes citizens’ electoral choices as resulting from careful and even-handed processing of information about policies and candidates, they are also based on a host of other, sometimes substantively unrelated factors. Accordingly, parties and candidates appeal not only to the rational faculties of voters but also to their emotions and affect. Are parties able to arouse the intended emotions via their campaign communications? Why do some people experience the emotions a communication intends while others do not and why do some people display stronger arousal than others? While the literature has amply described the effect that the experience of emotions has for citizens’ thinking and decision-making in the electoral arena, we know comparatively little about the determinants of emotional experiences in the first place. The paper contributes here by presenting the results of an experimental study conducted in a mid-sized German city roughly one year after the German federal election of 2017. 60 participants were randomly confronted with emotional appeals actually made by parties in their electoral campaigns (TV ads) versus two altered versions, one reducing aural-visual cues, the other additionally using more technical phrasings of the proposed issue positions. The valence of participants’ emotional reactions was tapped by recording and classifying their facial expressions. The level of their emotional arousal was tapped by measuring skin conductance. Short questionnaires administered before and after the stimulus gathered data on basic political attitudes. The set-up allows to approximate the relative contribution of pre-conscious aural-visual cues and post-conscious textual messages to emotional processing. It thereby informs the debate between neural process and appraisal theorists of emotion. Additionally, however, the resulting data allows us to model the emotional impact of the different messages as resulting not only from their make-up but also from the political attitudes of the recipients. Nonvoters are expected to display muted emotional reactions. Partisan supporters, in turn, are hypothesized to react with stronger arousal to the communication of their party and the party that constitutes their party’s antagonist in the system, with the valence of their reaction differing correspondingly. Evidence for this hypothesis would indicate that parties have successfully engaged in emotion work, in drawing from and shaping the norms that govern the experience and expression of emotions. While people might differ in their propensity to experience a given emotion given their genetic and biological make-up, competitive party discourse shapes which political stimuli individuals associate with which emotions in the first place.

Author

• Tristan Klingelhöfer, Johns Hopkins University