It was called âhard-cider campaigningâ when a political campaign functioned as popular entertainment for the masses. Before technological advances in mass communication, the nineteenth-century observer harbored expectations for spectacle from candidates and their political campaigns. Substantive campaign issues were secondary and the party organizations preferred it that way. Campaigns resembled something like a vaudeville act consisting of parades, floats, marching bands, and rallies and impressive lineups of popular glee clubs, church yard picnics, and free whisky (yes, free libations) were used liberally to rouse voters (Davidson et al. 1991). Up close and personal contact with candidates was unavoidable and a whisky-soaked crowd was an optimal audience for political grandstanding. One Kentucky politician said that his electoral success depended on one political strategy: âthe way to menâs hearts is down their throatsâ (Davidson et al. 1991). Gaining support from the average nineteenth-century voter was incentivized by devices that depended more on eliciting votersâ emotions, passions, and appetites than anything that appealed to an individualâs elevated sense of sophistication and reason.
Emotions are a durable feature of American campaigns and elections. Few observers of contemporary elections can deny that feelings are important elements in campaigns and, in turn, votersâ choices. Yet, that does not imply that the methods once used to rouse votersâ emotions correspond to those of the present. Politics are innately emotional because Americans have deeply internalized intersecting identities that get politicized in the public domain in one form or another. Because of this, American political history offers anecdotal evidence of the innately passionate environment of politics. Impassioned politics by any means necessary were âpolitics as usualâ in the early years of American democratic elections. In contemporary contexts, emotions are on display through the use of patriotic symbols, symbolic imagery, and speech presented to the mass audience of spectators through technological advances. The campaigns utilize calculated and targeted strategies designed specifically to appeal to votersâ emotions. Emotional cues are delivered not only via mass media, but there is an increasing amount of self-selected content delivered by the advent of the Internet and social media. Political campaigns in the twenty-first century may appear increasingly emotional. With the rise in polarized political parties and the increase in voter frustration and political splinter groups promoting âanti-establishmentâ philosophies, it is expected that campaigns will involve voters more emotionally than other periods in history. This book examines the inherently emotional culture of politics and when reviewing the research available on the role of emotions in politics; it clarifies how the non-emotive, substantive issues of a candidateâs platform become emotionally charged.
There are some key academic assumptions that frame this examination of emotion in American elections. First, campaigns matter. There are two approaches to studying elections and one is that candidatesâ actions, what they say and do, their strategies, and political events, determine electoral results. The other tends to ignore campaigns altogether and uses economic indicators to forecast outcomes. The examination of emotion in elections here is based on the approach that campaigns matter. Second, traditional political science research on behavior and participation has reliably excluded the impact of votersâ emotional responses. Third, the vindication of the role emotion has in politics and the proposal of including it as a variable in voting behavior research. Political environments activate feelings because it is a space where voters experience them. Surveys tap into the feelings expressed as responses to cues within the political environment. So, attention to political contexts is important when studying the influences of votersâ feelings in their political choices. Feelings are not just cognitive motivators of political action but are active in candidate and issue appraisal.
The Political Antagonist: Feelings
Emotions, as they are conventionally understood, are the traditional antagonistic actors in classic research on political behavior. Scholars of democratic elections tend to view the role of feelings as adversaries in the assumptions informing citizenry as they are shaped by classic philosophy. However, contemporary campaign strategists tend to appreciate the role of emotions differently than the predecessors of Western civilization. Open and competitive elections coupled with citizen participation shape virtually all ideas about democracy. There are certain expectations and assumptions underscoring conceptualizations about the democratic participation of citizens and often the role of emotions is noticeably absent.
Plato wrote that humans needed to be guided by âundistorted ethical truths, suppress passionate appetites, and desire rational things such as knowledge and justiceâ (Plato The Republic [1992]). Platoâs legacy helped Western culture redefine the practice and expectations of democratic citizenship. Such conceptualizations articulated expectations that voters were to act as impartial judges by practicing critical and rational deliberation when presented with political choices. Democratic theory explains that public policy reflects votersâ aggregate preferences and those preferences can only be fully articulated by rational actors who are fully aware of their goals and political aims (Dahl 1973, 1998). The notion is that healthy democracies are systems where officeholders reflect the expressed preferences of their constituents and voters hold a sense of civic obligation to participate in the process as an informed, dutiful citizen. These expectations result in treating feelings as an undesirable element of voting because feelings are thought to invoke irrational biases that are best held at bay.
While this premise is an ideal situation for a robust democracy, scholars have grown frustrated with the evidence of lackluster citizens. If voter preferences are to be adequately translated into public policies, then the reflection of those policies are only as good as the citizens who express their opinions. This communicates the expectation to the voter to be an informed participant in order to secure the most reliable expression of policy preference.
Classic democratic theory forces upon us an intellectual choice between reason and emotion. The former enables us to imagine Platoâs world driven by the rational desire for freedom, justice, and rights equitably enjoyed and protected. According to George Marcus (2002), the latter allows us to reach and motivate people without the guide for reason (to the ire of rationalists). Various emotions exert important but potentially different policy consequences, and different emotions influence the interpersonal nature of how people work together in a democracy despite differences (Hatemi and McDermott 2012). This is why emotions are interpreted as destructive forces that lead voters to what are popularly dismissed as irrational judgments. Barry (2002) relies on components of rationality (as defined by political economy) to define citizenry by promoting the rational benefits experienced in a democracy, which includes freedom from socialized incentives, coercive obligations (referring to political bosses), and partisan loyalties, along with the citizenâs civic obligation to evaluate political information impartially.
Aristotleâs classic thesis declared that humans were, by nature, political animals guided by the rational urge to commune with others to establish governments. The Greek philosophers emphasized reason as the supreme human virtue of sophistication. Marcus (2002) agrees with Aristotle that humans are creatures naturally attracted to social association, but disagrees that social attachments in the political realm are guided by ârationalâ urges. Rather, those communal bonds are emotional connections because emotion is an explicit requirement of citizenship, inasmuch as the connections among interest, party, and loyalty are used to secure the connections among voter, party, and candidates for national office (Marcus 2002, p. 36). Now cue the contemporary campaign strategist; emotion plays a central role in bonding voters to the parties, the issues, and, ultimately, the candidates. In contemporary politics the ubiquitous visualization of politics through the uses of symbols facilitates emotional bonds among voters in a democracy (Edelman 1978; Marcus 2002)
The expectation that citizens equally share civic obligation and responsibility to participate in a critical and informed fashion has not translated into longitudinal consistency in public opinion and has given way to frustrations among researchers within political science. Inconsistencies in public opinion over time have been explained by implicating citizensâ lack of ideological commitment or knowledge of political issues.
So the problem that has emerged in the study of political behavior is the interpretation of opinion trends in survey research. Some interpreted the lack of stable trends as the questionable quality of the voter. Not until psychological models emerged were these issues addressed. The first models of political behavior emerged in the American Voter (1960) and later in the Civic Culture (1976). Never before had the idea of votersâ feelings and their influence on attitudes toward politics been acknowledged or investigated. The evolution of the study of emotions in politics has been informed by interdisciplinary efforts to study the role of emotions in human cognition.
Traditional Approaches in Voting Behavior Research
Niemi and Weisberg (2001) claim that fundamentally the study of voting behavior is about what determines a vote. There are two schools of thought that guide research questions about what determines a vote choice. One perspective is a rational choice approach and the other is a psychological approach. Both have influenced the entire field of political science and continue to influence voting behavior research.
Conventional expectations of voters in American politics assumed that they make decisions based on a habitually meticulous and critical calculus predicated on utilitarian explanations of decision making (Downs 1957; Fiorina 1978). These and more recent interpretations of economic voting models state that all political behavior has a purpose and is done for specific reasons (Lowi et al. 2010). Simply, voters have goals and work to achieve those goals through political means. Rational political behavior operates on an assumption that voters engage in a process by which they weigh the risks of their political options and think through the costs and benefits of their political decisions while speculating about future effects (Lowi et al. 2010). This formulates the expectation that voters, under the rubric of rational choice, evaluate their choices by a process of forethought, deliberation, and calculation that is commonly referred to, by political scientists, as voter sophistication.
While economic voting models may confront voters with a cognitively burdensome standard, psychological approaches comparable to the one advanced in the American Voter (1960) redefine voter sophistication in more accessible terms. Campbell et al. (1960) claim that party identification is just one among several psychological components that voters rely upon to make political choices. Party identification is defined as the âpsychological identification, which can persist without legal recognition or evidence of formal membership and even without a consistent record of party supportâ (Campbell et al. 121, 1960). Party identification is a cornerstone of electoral politics and voting behavior research because it is the single most effective predictor of vote choice (Campbell et al. 1960; Converse 1964; 2000; Neimi and Weisberg 1993; Greene 1999; Brewer 2005). According to the American Voter, party identification is also important for its utility in studying other aspects of the American political system. Party identification signals a reasonably stable voter and, under normal electoral circumstances, a predisposed loyalty to a party organization (Wattenberg 1998, 8; Converse 2000).
A political party, as an organization, functions as a source of political information that delivers cues to voters, which, in turn, they utilize to evaluate the validity of political campaigns, candidates, and issues (Campbell et al. 1960; Wattenberg 1998; Miller and Shanks 1996). The concept of party identification has provided a traditional framework to understand voting behavior. Research suggests that over time partisanship is a relatively stable political identity (Converse et al. 1960; Wattenberg 1998; Converse 2000). This offers a positive outlook for the stability of democracy because steady partisanship serves as a âstabilizing influence on public opinion and consequently on the political systemâ (Wattenberg 1998, 10). In view of economic v...