Emotions, Campaigns, and Political Participation

There has been a scarcity of work examining the political consequences of discrete emotions. This article examines the political effects of several emotions-anger, sadness, fear, and enthusiasm. Emotional ads should influence whether voters become politically active. To test this, two experiments were administered. The first examines emotional responses to campaign messages; the second tests whether emotions influence political participation. The results indicate anger is mobilizing, by increasing participatory intentions and factors related to participate. This result is then replicated using ad-tracking data. The findings indicate that emotions are an important factor in studying campaign effects.