Political Affect and Emotions in a Changing USA Landscape

• In Event: Affective Experiences and Current Political Environments

Abstract

The study of emotions in politics has become central to political psychology since the introduction of affective intelligence theory (Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen 2000). Debates about the proper measurement of political emotions have resulted in an abundance of studies on emotions and their political impacts. However, the impact of negative emotions is not consistent across ethnoracial groups in the United States (Phoenix 2019). The two most recent presidential elections featured high levels of negative emotions towards all candidates, but in particular Donald Trump. A recent study has found that news headlines have become increasingly negative since 2000, especially among right-wing news sources (Rozado, Hughes & Halberstadt, 2022). Existing theories of mobilization predicted a large increase in Latinx mobilization as a result of anger towards the Republican candidate (Gutierrez et al. 2019), but this did not happen, and Latinos even voted in larger numbers for Trump than for the previous Republican Presidential Candidates. In this paper we leverage publicly available data with large oversamples of non-white respondents (ANES and CMPS) as well as unique experiments conducted between 2016 and 2020 with Latino samples to explore the prevalence of political emotions across different ethnoracial groups in the United States, as well as the impact of these emotions on candidate support and mobilization. We specifically ask whether recent electoral cycles (Trump era) are more emotional than previous ones (Obama era), whether the level of emotion is distributed similarly across race and ethnicity, and whether the anxiety impacts vote choice and political interest equally across ethnoracial groups in the United States. We also explore the impact of anger and enthusiasm on mobilization to further test the broad applicability of existing theories of emotions and politics. We extend the existing literature by showing the differential impact of political emotions across the racial spectrum of American politics. We conclude by proposing novel ways to measure affect and emotions in politics across an increasingly diverse electorate.

Authors

• Angel Saavedra Cisneros, Bowdoin College

• Andrew Civettini, Knox College