Affect and Voter Information Processing and Learning in a Campaign
What role does emotion play in political decision-making, particularly in terms of
voter’s and elections? Classical political theory separates emotion and reason into distinct
realms, clearly placing politics in the “rational” reasoning column. Yet recent advances in
neuroscience (for example, Damasio, 1999) and theoretical contributions to political
science (Marcus et al., 200) have drawn attention to the centrality of emotion in human
decision-making and suggested its necessary involvement in what we previously thought
of as rational thought. In previous work with we demonstrated the effect of anxiety and
enthusiasm on campaign decision-making but at the same time we argued for a more
stringent test of the hypotheses of the theory of affective intelligence (Redlawsk, Lau,
and Civettini, forthcoming). We further argued that the typical post-hoc measures of
anxiety (measured well after any event that might have caused the emotion) ought to be
placed under scrutiny; these measures require our full attention if we are to build upon
early assumptions derived from them.
This paper represents an early step in a larger project designed to test a number of
assumptions and hypotheses about how emotions and cognition interact in voter decision
making. We have developed and carried out a complex experiment using a dynamic
information board (Lau and Redlawsk, 2001) in which subjects experienced a primary
election campaign under varying conditions of emotional involvement and manipulation.
In addition to manipulating potential emotional responses to candidates, we have
developed measures to help us understand the implications of these emotional responses
for voter information search, acquisition, and learning. Here we will report on two basic
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Support for this project was provided by the Social Sciences Funding Program at the
University of Iowa. Thanks also to a talented group of undergraduate students who
provided assistance: Karen Emmerson, Paul Heppner, Christian Urrutia, Molly Berkery,
Jason Jaffe, Anthony Raninger, Matthew Opad, Parsa Fattahi, and James Neal.
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Convention