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.

Microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors: An interdisciplinary exploration

This article discusses a problem that has received scant attention in literature: microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors. Microtargeting involves collecting information about people, and using that information to show them targeted political advertisements. Such microtargeting enables advertisers to target ads to specific groups of people, for instance people who visit certain websites, forums, or Facebook groups. This article focuses on one type of microtargeting: microtargeting by foreign actors. For example, Russia has targeted certain groups in the US with ads, aiming to sow discord. Foreign actors could also try to influence European elections, for instance by advertising in favour of a certain political party. Foreign propaganda possibilities existed before microtargeting. This article explores two questions. In what ways, if any, is microtargeted propaganda by foreign actors different from other foreign propaganda? What could lawmakers in Europe do to mitigate the risks of microtargeted propaganda?

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.

On Disinformation, Elections and Ethiopian Law

Disinformation has become a formidable challenge to the integrity of electoral processes as well as the internal political stability of many countries. This state of affairs has spurred a wave of new regulatory measures in several countries. From stringent rules governing dissemination of political advertisements via social media platforms to media literacy programmes, the past few years saw the introduction of legislative and non-legislative measures in many jurisdictions. Ethiopia is no exception in introducing measures to address the problem. This article examines Ethiopia's policy responses towards addressing the impact of disinformation on the integrity and credibility of elections. It argues that measures taken thus far in Ethiopia appear to address the impact of disinformation on national security and social harmony. As such, Ethiopia has not taken tailored measures to address the impact of disinformation on its democratic aspirations, particularly in holding free, fair and democratic elections.

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.

Experiencing multimodal rhetoric and argumentation in political advertisements: a study of how people respond to the rhetoric of multimodal communication

Research into visual and multimodal rhetoric has been dominated by social scientific and textual perspectives that may not be able to provide documented understandings of how rhetorical objects are actually experienced by an audience. In this study, the authors engage in rhetorical protocol analysis through 10 in-depth interviews asking informants to make sense of selected political advertisements in the 2020 US election campaign. They examine the types of competing sensory elements found within the campaign texts and situations, which they term ‘multimodal incongruity’ and establish two types of cognitive frameworks informants use when engaging in the political rhetoric of the commercials: personal experience and cynicism. Personal experience allowed the informants to make sense of and argue against campaign messages. Cynicism often guided participants to unpack the generic conventions of political advertising, politics more generally, and opposing partisan strategies. Both interpretive frames – but the frame of cynicism, in particular – enable participants to critically distance their reading of and emotional response to the campaign commercials. This critical distancing reveals connections between rationality and emotionality through ‘deliberative embedding’, meaning that the emotional is understood in terms of and negotiated in relation to already established cognitive frameworks of information, opinions and cynical readings of the genre. The authors conclude the essay by reflecting on their methodological and theoretical insights regarding multimodal rhetoric.

Split Feelings: Understanding Implicit and Explicit Political Persuasion

Research in psychology has established that people have visceral positive and negative reactions to all kinds of stimuli—so-called implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes are empirically distinct from explicit attitudes, and they appear to have separate consequences for political behavior. However, little is known about whether they change in response to different factors than explicit attitudes. Identifying distinct antecedents for implicit and explicit attitudes would have far-reaching implications for the study of political persuasion. We hypothesized that implicit attitudes would change primarily in response to political advertisements’ emotional valence, but this turned out to be wrong. In contrast, our next hypothesis that implicit (but not explicit) attitudes would improve in response to increased familiarity with an attitude object was supported across several tests. Aside from this finding, our studies illustrate how routine preregistration helps researchers convey what they learned from each test—including when predictions are not borne out.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf : examining attacks on Canada's federal centre-right political parties in the televised negative political advertisements between 1993 and 2006 using propaganda analysis

This thesis uses a triangulated methodology of focus groups, semiotic analysis, and content analysis to categorize and analyze the televised negative political advertisements aired during the Canadian federal elections between 1993 and 2006. How these attacks made against the conservative parties during this timeframe were interpreted by mothers of adolescent children receives particular considerations. The findings demonstrate that during this period the Canadian debate between individualism and communitarianism was prevalent in these political advertisements. It is argued that propaganda methods, namely the name calling technique, were used effectively by the left-wing parties to emphasize specific ideological traditions in conservatism and to link the conservative parties to the United States of America for strategic purposes. The author contends that political advertisements are complex expressions of a party's ideology and goals, thus this campaign tool ought to be studied more by Canadian academics.

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf : examining attacks on Canada's federal centre-right political parties in the televised negative political advertisements between 1993 and 2006 using propaganda analysis

This thesis uses a triangulated methodology of focus groups, semiotic analysis, and content analysis to categorize and analyze the televised negative political advertisements aired during the Canadian federal elections between 1993 and 2006. How these attacks made against the conservative parties during this timeframe were interpreted by mothers of adolescent children receives particular considerations. The findings demonstrate that during this period the Canadian debate between individualism and communitarianism was prevalent in these political advertisements. It is argued that propaganda methods, namely the name calling technique, were used effectively by the left-wing parties to emphasize specific ideological traditions in conservatism and to link the conservative parties to the United States of America for strategic purposes. The author contends that political advertisements are complex expressions of a party's ideology and goals, thus this campaign tool ought to be studied more by Canadian academics.