Emotional Campaigning in Politics: Being Moved and Anger in Political Ads Motivate to Support Candidate and Party

Political advertising to recruit the support of voters is an inherent part of politics. Today, ads are distributed via television and online, including social media. This type of advertisement attempts to recruit support by presenting convincing arguments and evoking various emotions about the candidate, opponents, and policy proposals. We discuss recent arguments and evidence that a specific social emotion, namely the concept kama muta, plays a role in political advertisements. In vernacular language, kama muta is typically labeled as being moved or touched. We compare kama muta and anger theoretically and discuss how they can influence voters’ willingness to support a candidate. We then, for the first time, compare kama muta and anger empirically in the same study. Specifically, we showed American participants short political ads during the 2018 United States midterm election campaigns. All participants saw both kama muta- and anger-evoking ads from both Democratic or Republican candidates. In total, everybody watched eight ads. We assessed participants’ degree of being moved and angered by the videos and their motivation for three types of political support: ideational, financial, and personal. The emotional impact of an ad depended on its perceived source: Participants felt especially angry after watching the anger-evoking ads and especially moved by moving ads if they identified with the political party that had produced the video. Both emotions mediated were associated with increased intentions to provide support. Importantly, if one of the two emotions was evoked, its effect on political support was enhanced if participants identified with the party that had produced the ad. We discuss limitations of the method and implications of the results for future research and practice.

Emotional politics: Moving and upsetting political ads on the motivation to support candidate and party

Political campaigning is an inherent part of politics to recruit support from voters. Video advertisement for a political candidate or party has been a widely used method for many years, distributed via television and online, including social media. This type of advertisement attempts to recruit support by presenting convincing arguments and evoking various emotions about the candidate, opponents, and policy proposals. In the present paper, we review existing work on what emotions are most prevalent, focusing particularly on anger and enthusiasm. We discuss recent arguments and evidence that a specific social emotion, namely the concept kama muta, plays a role in political advertisements. In vernacular language, kama muta is typically labeled being moved or touched. Seminal video examples from the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns are known to evoke this emotion. We compare anger and kama muta theoretically and discuss how they can influence voters’ willingness to support a candidate. We then, for the first time, compare kama muta and anger empirically in the same study. Specifically, we showed American participants short political ads from the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that either evoked anger or kama muta and came from either Democratic or Republican candidates. We assessed participants' degree of being angered and moved by the videos and their motivation for three types of political support: ideational, financial and personal. Participants were more angered by the selected anger-evoking videos and more moved by the selected moving videos of the party which they identified with more. They were also more motivated to support the advertised candidate and party in different ways if either emotion was elicited. If an emotion was evoked, its effect on political support was largely independent from the prior support for the party. In other words, elicitation, but not impact, of an emotion is moderated by prior social identification in the context of political advertisement. We discuss limitations of the method and implications of the results for future research and practice.

Antidiscrimination Interventions, Political Ads on Transgender Rights, and Public Opinion: Results From Two Survey Experiments on Adults in the United States

Political advertisements can shift attitudes and behaviors to become more exclusionary toward social out-groups. However, people who engage in an antidiscrimination exercise in the context of an experiment may respond differently to such ads. What interventions might foster inclusive attitudes in the presence of political communications about social policy issues like transgender rights? We examined two scalable antidiscrimination exercises commonly used in applied settings: describing a personal narrative of discrimination and perspective-taking. We then showed people political ads that are favorable or opposed to transgender rights to determine whether those interventions moderate how receptive people are to the messages. Relying on two demographically representative survey experiments of adults in the United States (study 1 N = 1,291; study 2 N = 1,587), we found that personal recollections of discriminatory experiences did not reduce exclusionary attitudes, but perspective-taking had some effects, particularly among those who fully complied with the exercise. However, both studies revealed potential backfire effects; recalling a discriminatory experience induced negative attitudes among a subset of the participants, and participants who refused to perspective-take when prompted also held more negative attitudes. Importantly, political ads favorable toward transgender rights consistently resulted in more positive attitudes toward transgender people. Future work needs to carefully examine heterogeneous responses and resistance to antidiscrimination interventions and examine what particular aspects of the political ads induced the attitude change.

Native advertising and the credibility of online publishers

The digitization of news publishing has resulted in new ways for advertisers to reach readers, including additional native advertising formats that blend in with news. However, native ads may redirect attention off-site and affect the readers' impression of the publishers. Using a combination of observations of ad content across many publishers and two large randomized experiments, we investigate the characteristics of a pervasive native ad format and compare the impact of different native ads characteristics on perceived news credibility. Analyzing 1.4 million collected ad headlines, we found that over 80% of these ad headlines use a clickbait-style and that politics is among the most common topics in ads. In two randomized experiments (combined n=9,807), we varied the style and content of native ads embedded in news articles and asked people to assess the articles’ credibility. Experiment 1 (n=4,767) suggested that different publishers were impacted differently by the ads and motivated the more detailed design of Experiment 2 (n=5,040). This latter experiment used hundreds of unique combinations of ads, articles, and publishers to study effects of clickbait and political ads. Findings from this pre-registered experiment provide evidence that clickbait and, to a lesser extent, political ads, substantially reduce readers' perception of the articles' credibility. This phenomenon is driven by the least well-known publishers and by readers' prior familiarity with those publishers. Importantly, we rule out large effects of non-clickbait ads, compared with no ads, on readers' attitudes. Many publishers using clickbait native ads may trade short-term revenues for audience trust.

Persona and the Modern Republican: Constituting and Deconstituting Republican Ideals in Two Republican Political Ads

Ronald Reagan’s iconic, 1984 advertisement, “Morning in America,” has served as an ideological pole star for Republican identity for the past four decades. More recently, the political action committee, The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republicans, produced a number of ads highly critical of President Donald Trump’s administration. One specific ad, “Mourning in America,” uses the form of the original 1984 ad to communicate a set of radically different ideas from the original. This article fuses Black’s second persona and Wander’s third persona to Charland’s idea of constitutive rhetoric to explore how “Morning in America” constitutes a Republican identity via a matrimonial symbolism that connects candidate to a gauzy, constructed community and imagined culture. We argue that the Lincoln Project’s “Mourning in America” deconstitutes the very ideals promulgated in the original ad through a stark funereal symbolism. The implications of this symbolism on the Republican identity are discussed in the conclusion.

Narratives in Televised Political Ads: Toward Alternative Discourses and Critical Voters

Televised political ads are powerful instruments of campaign communication because they are dominant and ubiquitous repositories of narratives by candidates and their strategists. Using Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm and Robert Rowland’s narrative approach, this study looks into the use of narratives in 127 political TV ads in the 2016 and 2019 national elections. The discussion is divided into two major sections. First, the study uncovers dominant, emerging, and missing narratives in the TV ads and reflects on what these narratives reveal about Philippine political culture. Second, through a critique of these existing narratives, this study raises the challenge of reimagining and creating ads that foster critical public discourse. To this end, the paper recommends alternative topics, subjects, and strategies to improve TV ads in the future while recognizing the medium’s constraints such as length and costs.