Voter Responses to Emotional Appeals

• In Event: Mobilizing Voters in the Global South

Abstract

Emotions involve a variety of physiological, behavioral, and cognitive factors with implications for the way that individuals engage in politics. We combine a new field experiment and structural model of vote choice to explore not only the effects of emotional messaging in political campaigns, but also the the ways that emotions can affect the underlying processes of political decision-making.

The core of the project is a field experiment conducted in collaboration with a major political party in the Philippines during the May 2019 Senatorial elections. The field experiment randomizes the emotional messaging in official party campaign activities. Voters in randomly selected villages received scripted door-to-door visits by party volunteers. Voters in a randomly selected subset of those villages further received messages expected to trigger positive emotions. We also estimate key parameters of a structural model of vote choice based on elicitation of voters beliefs and heterogenous preferences for policy.

We show that while the short term effects of emotional messaging can increase immediate support for the political party (measured as indicating support at the time of the door-to-door visit, as well as willingness to provide a phone number to be contacted later), these effects do not persist until election day. Once at the polling place, it is the informational content of the campaign messaging that has the largest effects, suggesting that even in clientelistic political environments, voters may be more rational and sophisticated than the literature often gives them credit for.

Emotions are important for understanding politics because of their role in cognition and decision-making (Lerner and Keltner 2000; Schwarz 2000). While there is widespread acknowledgement that emotions are important for understanding politics, how emotion matters is still an open question and most of the literature has moved away from simple valence effects to suggest that emotions operate in more complex ways (see, e.g., Rudolph et. al. 2000; Brader 2005; DellaVigna 2009).

Our work extends this literature by combining an experimental test of emotional content in a real-world campaign with a structural model of emotional effects in vote choice, allowing us to assess not only the effect of emotional messaging, but to better understand how emotions interact with and operate through different dimensions of vote choice.

Authors

• Cesi Cruz, University of California, Los Angeles

• Julien Labonne

• Francesco Trebbi, University of British Columbia