Thinking-Feeling Politics

Introduction

We swim amid dense waters, seas of focus-tested messages and organizational mission statements, searching as scavengers do, sifting through sand for knowledge. Not unlike oceans littered with plastic bottles, information gets polluted prior to public consumption. News outlets cut video clips down to size, often depriving them of full context. And rather than take rival views at face value, candidates misrepresent them. Our instinctive response as citizens, burrowing noses deeper into competing ideological camps, polarizes us further. We choose to consume ideas that bring us exclusively comfort, not confrontation. Another development muddies this liberal pipedream of uncorrupted civic debate. Pervasive now like never before are cases of manufactured fanaticism, stories floating across newsfeeds and inboxes devoid of truth. So much uncertainty encircling us, voters have latched onto leaders who offer apparent authenticity, whose voices shouted loud and passionate cries for change.

Democratic societies face a precarious predicament. Our political system functions eerily similar to preschool playgrounds, parties in charge refusing to find common ground with minority factions. Citizens appear to crave, above all else, honesty from institutions they consider historically untrustworthy. A paradox persists since come decision time, voters elect incumbent members to government posts at rates over 90 percent. Although nobody likes Congress overall, constituents hold generally views of their individual representative. These contradictions continue to baffle scholars of electoral behavior.

Although foundational work on affective intelligence, namely Marcus, Neuman, and Mackuen, conceived rational and emotional thinking as complementary forces underpinning electoral decision making, Ted Brader wanted to establish causal links between changes in message tone and voter behavior. His 2005 article, examines how campaign advertising uses emotional appeals to accomplish three outcomes: mobilization, information seeking, and persuasion. Brader suspected minor variations in music and imagery would dramatically alter how voters internalized these messages and acted upon them.

To determine whether his hunch was correct, Brader conducted two experiments in 1998 involving two democratic politicians from Massachusetts, both vying to become governor. His first tested enthusiasm-eliciting features, “uplifting music and warm, colorful images,” set behind neutral scripts addressing education, crime, and drugs, while his second treated equivalent copy combined with threatening cues, such as discordant audio and grainy, black-and-white pictures.

Around these frameworks, Brader produced campaign advertisements. He taped a 30-minute local news program, made copies, and slotted several different ads during one commercial break. His subjects were 286 men and women, mostly middle-aged, from 11 communities across suburban Massachusetts. Problematically, 89 percent were white, ten points overrepresented. Shortly after arriving, each completed a pretest questionnaire. They were randomly assigned to an experimental condition, asked to view a videotape recording of said broadcast, then answer open-ended questions about the program. Only during a manipulation check did Brader directly mention campaign advertising.

Besides demographic imbalances in his sample, Brader only tangentially accounts for competing ads counteracting each other and concedes that arousing excitement in voters may product “bursts of motivation” likely to fade if not reinforced. He evaluates attention and information seeking through posttest comprehension questions, which contradicts his otherwise naturalistic approach. Judging vigilance, as Brader labels it, retention immediately after consuming a message fails to accurately account beyond short-term engagement effects. Perhaps reconvening with subjects a week or two after initially meeting them would better service his goals in this regard.

Brader ultimately confirms the relationship between anxiety and political judgment as studied by Marcus et al. Fear appeals provoke information seeking and stimulate “bottom-up” processing of information. His second, more substantial conclusion is that enthusiasm appeals strengthen partisan identity and “solidify existing preferences.” Brader is unable to support his belief that negative ads eliciting fear enable critical reflection.

Taken together, if we consider his methodology, theory, and results, Brader advances affective intelligence theory by experimentalizing it. His work develops a solid foundation for further scholarship looking to connect emotion and political messages, a theoretical tradition originating pre-Aristotle which is finally getting appropriate academic attention.

What remains unclear after Brader is how campaigns can strategically utilize emotional appeals to elicit desired reactions from voters. Another factor that has since matured is knowledge of emotional appeals other than enthusiasm and fear. Rather than dual-channel affective models, researchers including Ridout & Searles have studied the turnout results of anger and pride appeals. They found, unsurprisingly, that campaigns cue particular feelings in a systematic, patterned manner. Anger appeals predictably dominate among challengers during the final stretch of particularly competitive campaigns. Enthusiasm appeals, as Brader found, typically appear early on. Appeals to pride also kickoff campaign messaging, helping to rally support. Finally, fear appeals come deeper into elections and function at times to steal wavering voters from your competition.

Study proposal

My hypothetical study would construct artificial candidates running for public office in a swing state. Unlike previous persuasion experiments, I will modify campaign rhetoric, words, rather than music and imagery accompanying television ads as Brader did. Establishing a truly middle-brow, inoffensive neutral message might prove tricky. Additional instruments that would be designed include recruiting materials for study participants, a pre-questionnaire, and some form of manipulation check. Post-test surveys, comprehension questions, and feeling thermometer inquiries were effectively used in Brader to document persuasion effects. I would consider using each method accordingly.

One difficulty with this exercise is finding a quantifiable way of measuring persuasiveness. On its own, persuasion is a rather nonspecific idea. It seems inherently subjective. Social science succeeds when concepts can be studied empirically and later replicated based on your methodology. That being said, we will model this experiment partly on Brader who measured ad effectiveness along three dimensions: motivation, future information seeking, and voter conversion. We shall essentially replicate that operation while also incorporating two additional ideas Iyengar introduced: episodic and thematic framing. By bridging these two concepts, we are devising a dual-process or integrated theory of persuasion. A theoretical breakdown of my dependent variables is pasted below.

Hypotheses

I expect messages that strategically frame issues using fear-based emotional appeals will elicit stronger responses than neutral advertisements based purely in fact. Likewise but likely less so for enthusiasm-based appeals. And those drawing attention to individual human stories or case studies (episodic framing) should be found even more engaging.

Controls

There are a variety of factors that this potential study would control for. Most notably the quality of arguments offered. To insure internal validity, that our experiment is actually studying the relationship between framed and emotionalized messages and persuasion, we must make sure that the fundamental ideas represented hold consistent. Other factors that must be standardized across treatment groups are interest in politics, one’s inclination to vote, and typical demographic measures such as age, income, education. We can utilize pretest surveys to group participants into their partisan blocks. Controlling for the relative intensity of partisan bonds is important.

Another measure that must be kept at bay is temporal. Affective intelligence theorists found divergent types of emotional appeals succeeding at different weeks of the campaign. The recipient of our messages should be held in control as well as the platform through which our message gets transmitted. Just as different emotional appeals have divergent persuasive effects at different moments in time, one type of emotional appeal might have divergent effects on different platforms. For instance, social media could cater better towards episodic framing while thematic framing might be better suited to podcasts.

Sources

Brader, Ted. “Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions.” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 2 (2005): 388-405.
Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk.” Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263-91.
Marcus, George E., W. Russell Neuman, and Michael Mackuen. Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Ridout, Travis N., and Kathleen Searles. “It’s My Campaign I’ll Cry If I Want To: How and When Campaigns Use Emotional Appeals.” Political Psychology 32, no. 3 (2011): 439-58.
Taber, Charles S., and Milton Lodge. “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs.” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 3 (2006): 755-69.