An exploration of people's emotional reactions to presidential candidates during the campaign.

Abstract

Emotions are a part of people's daily experiences and interactions with others. To the extent that politics touches on people's lives, so too should emotion be a part of people's reactions to political phenomena. This study focuses on people's emotional reactions to presidential candidates, exploring the range of emotions people experience and the effect of these on people's evaluations and choices. By their words and their actions, political actors and their consultants show that they believe emotions to be consequential for people's attitudes and choices, but we know relatively little about the scope and impact of such emotions on decisions, or whether and why some emotions are more consequential than others. The study draws heavily on cognitive appraisal models from social psychology, which argue that people's emotional responses are driven by the nature of the appraisals people make of a given situation and individual. The analysis employs primarily two sources of data: one a series of in-depth interviews conducted during the course of the 1996 general presidential election campaign; and the other American National Election Studies data from 1980 through 1996. The overall results from the study were consistent with cognitive appraisal models. Emotional responses to presidential candidates were widespread at the individual level, and people had a rich and varied set of explanations for their reactions. The number and range of reactions were related to the degree of familiarity with the candidates, and partisans were likely to report reactions to candidates consistent with their party identification. Analysis of aggregate data, however, suggested that the impact of these emotions on candidate evaluation and vote choices was small. This may be so because to the degree that people's emotions were consistent with their underlying political predispositions, the effects of emotion on evaluation and choice were largely captured in these variables. It may also be that the effects of emotion are most significant just for segments of the population---those who have no or weak party affiliation or predispositions. I conclude with a discussion of how we might think differently about the role and nature of emotion in democratic politics.