A Framework for the Study of Electoral Persuasion

Electoral persuasion rests at the center of the democratic process. Politicians, parties, interest groups, members of the media, and citizens themselves are constantly communicating with one another about electorally relevant topics. These communications will ultimately influence—although not always in predictable ways—voters’ choices and, therefore, election outcomes and the direction of government. Scholarship on this important topic has exploded in recent decades. Yet, there have been relatively few efforts to synthesize the accumulated knowledge. In this volume, we bring together accomplished scholars who study one or more aspects of electoral persuasion—who communicates with whom about democratic politics, what they communicate about and why, how and where they communicate, and with what effect. The result is a vibrant collection of US-based and international perspectives on the relevant actors, their motivations and methods of persuasion, and their varied influences on electoral choice.

Sowing Distrust of the News Media as an Electoral Strategy

Since the 1970s, trust in the news media went through a period of general decline and then a second period (since 2000) of polarization by party. Currently, trust in the media is low among those of all political affiliations, but it is substantially lower among Republicans than Democrats. Scholars have investigated a variety of plausible causes of this increasing distrust of the media, yet the largest source of this change seems to be increasing amounts of criticism of the institutional media from politicians and political pundits. This trend also has important consequences for how people acquire political information and make election decisions. Those who distrust the news media are more likely to consume information from partisan news outlets, and are more resistant to a fairly wide variety of media effects on public opinion. Because it can partially insulate one’s supporters from many types of media persuasion, partisan attacks on the news media have become an increasingly prominent political tactic.

Race and Racism in US Campaigns

Lately, much has been made about the state of disrepair of American democracy. Oddly enough, race and racism are almost always absent from these accounts. If campaigns, elections, and representation remain central to American democracy, and some researchers think they do, the impact of racial difference must be considered. This chapter undertakes to examine work in this vein, hoping to shed light on the continuing significance or race and racism. In the end, it shows that appeals to race and racism continues to play a key role in the American democratic experiment.

When, How, and Why Persuasion Fails

All citizens, including the most sophisticated and attentive, possess a powerful drive to defend their opinions, attitudes, and worldviews in the face of challenges. This bias manifests as an active effort to rationalize what they want to believe rather than accepting incongruent viewpoints. This propensity to dismiss or counterargue perspectives we do not like is evident across political identities and raises serious obstacles to successfully shifting others’ attitudes. This article presents an integrated understanding of these information processing phenomena under the John Q. Public model and explains how prior beliefs, confirmation bias, and disconfirmation bias interact to produce persistence in evaluations. It then goes on to explain how network analysis and experimental designs can be leveraged to illuminate the black box of communication effects and deepen our understanding of when persuasion is successful. Mapping out the cognitive relationships between semantic concepts and connecting these to a raw, affective charge provides a clearer view of citizens’ understanding of issues and how their thoughts and feelings shift in response to targeted political messaging.

The Boundary Conditions of Motivated Reasoning

Decades of research on motivated reasoning have found that citizens routinely place a higher priority on defending their preexisting beliefs than on updating them in response to new and conflicting experiences. Scholars have employed a variety of strategies in their efforts to eliminate, or at least mitigate, the reactive and polarizing effects of motivated reasoning. In this chapter, we provide a conceptual framework for navigating this body of literature that categorizes these efforts based upon how their interventions moderate the three central dimensions of information processing: priors, motivations, and considerations. This review of an extensive and growing literature finds that purely cognitive approaches to political communication are insufficient for overcoming subjects’ powerful drive to rationalize their own perspective. Accepting, understanding, and embracing the role of affect in shaping information processing offers promise for redirecting attention and reshaping intentions for the purpose of overcoming the limitations of situated perspectives.

A Menu of Clientelist Methods to Buy and Coerce Voters

This chapter provides a new typology of clientelist methods of manipulating voters based on three characteristics: the nature of the inducements to voters, the broker providing the inducements, and the voters receiving the inducements. The chapter postulates two types of inducements (positive and negative), three types of brokers (bureaucrats, partisans, and employers), and three types of voters (supporters, undecided, and opposed). Combining the types of brokers and the types of voters with the types of inducements leads to twelve possible methods of manipulation that patrons (i.e., politicians) may use to influence their clients (i.e., citizens). These subcategories are illustrated with empirical cases from the large and rapidly growing literature on clientelism around the world. Developing such typology may bring conceptual clarity to a series of important phenomena that hinder the proper functioning of elections in many new and old democracies, and which have been collectively labeled “clientelism.”

The Strategic Adaptation of the Populist Radical Right in Western Europe

Populist radical right parties have long been considered to mobilize their voters on specific issues, which they are deemed to “own.” Voters support these parties largely because of their “nativist” agenda, and more precisely because of their stance against immigration. In fact, research had established a “winning formula” of electoral persuasion for radical right parties, referring to a combination of “economically neoliberal” and “authoritarian” appeals that would jointly explain the strong electoral support. However, populist radical right parties have transformed their positions, through “second order messages,” by investing in a socioeconomic issue agenda. These parties can increase their electoral support by siding with their working class voters on redistributive issues, particularly through a welfare chauvinist frame. This chapter argues that populist radical right parties have strategically shifted on this latter dimension in order to adapt to their voters’ preferences. It shows that, in view of increased electoral persuasion, populist radical right parties modify some of their positions to tailor them to their working-class core electoral clientele.

Persuasion and Ballot Propositions

A long-standing criticism of voters in direct democracy elections is that they lack informed and stable opinions on policy issues and are therefore highly susceptible to campaigns. Voters are therefore not so much persuaded by substantive arguments to vote in a way that is consistent with fixed policy views but instead are pushed and pulled to vote for and against ballot measures since the foundations of their preferences rest on inconsistent and incomplete ideologies. Voters in ballot proposition contests are, in other words, persuaded all too easily to change their views. This chapter reviews that argument and presents evidence for a counter-argument that voters—at least in the US setting—are less open to persuasion than the literature often suggests.

Party Nominations and Electoral Persuasion

US nominating institutions do not always seem to work as the conventional wisdom suggests they should. This chapter explores the intellectual puzzles of the US primary election literature, connects them to a broader comparative literature on nominations, and examines recent differences between the United States and United Kingdom. The expected relationship between institutional design and political outcomes is complicated by the environments for electoral persuasion. The chapter proposes that some recent innovations, such as California’s “top-two” procedure, provide a potentially fruitful area of research for scholars to investigate the interaction between party nominations and electoral persuasion.

The Emotional Aspects of Political Persuasion

Political persuasion relies on emotion. Emotions grab people’s attention and can be a starting point for changing minds. Positive emotions tend to reinforce standing dispositions and encourage us to proceed as usual, but often politics and political science research involve negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, disgust, and shame. Where anxiety leads people to consider new information, most research suggests that anger does not facilitate this process of reconsideration and thus can make persuasion more difficult. Emotions like anger, shame, and enthusiasm all underlie the decision to participate in politics and can motivate voting while hatred can lead to support for violence. The chapter ends by considering how different research designs can uncover the effects of multiple, competing emotions, how emotions matter in small group discussion and how emotions color the acceptance of news.