How I Vote Depends on How I Feel: The Differential Impact of Anger and Fear on Political Information Processing

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Introduction (via APS)

Long-popular rational-choice models of voting (e.g., Riker & Ordeshook, 1968) suggest that affect plays a nonexistent or detrimental role in voting decisions. However, more recent work demonstrates affect’s powerful and sometimes beneficial function (see Isbell, Ottati, & Burns, 2006). Some researchers have assumed that negative affective reactions, particularly fear, lead voters to disengage and go astray from the democratic ideal—that is, a nation of well-informed voters who choose the candidate who best represents their concerns (for a review, see Valentino, Hutchings, Banks, & Davis, 2008). Recent research examining the effects of discrete negative emotions paints a more complex picture and suggests that this assumption may be inaccurate (Lerner & Tiedens, 2006). In fact, fear may contribute to the ideal of informed voting by enhancing detailed processing (Tiedens & Linton, 2001), whereas anger may detract from this ideal by promoting less careful processing and reliance on heuristics (Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994). Consistent with this possibility, work in political science (e.g., Marcus, Neuman, & MacKuen, 2000; Valentino et al., 2008) suggests that anxiety (fear) motivates citizens to learn, which may lead them to become better informed voters. The current work examined how this process might unfold and extended earlier work by
examining the effects of anger and fear on voters’ decision making.

Although some political scientists acknowledge the importance of examining how voters research candidates and reach a decision (Lau & Redlawsk, 2006), psychologists (Jacoby, Jaccard, Kuss, Troutman, & Mazursky, 1987) and political scientists alike rarely use behavior-process research methods (but see Lau & Redlawsk, 2006). Yet such a paradigm captures the real-world information processing of voters who actively and selectively seek out information. We relied on this methodology to test the prediction that fear would lead participants to use specific issue-based information when choosing a candidate, whereas anger would lead participants to rely on general criteria (e.g., party loyalty).

Findings (via APS)

These results suggest that fear predicts greater reliance on detailed issue-agreement information as a basis for voting decisions, whereas anger predicts greater reliance on general criteria.

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