Catching My Anger: How Political Elites Create Angrier Citizens

• Author: Carey E. Stapleton,Ryan Dawkins
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211026972
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211026972

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211026972

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Anger is a powerful political emotion. It can motivate

action (Lerner and Tiedens 2006), encourage partisan

behavior (MacKuen et al. 2010), and make individuals less

systematic in how they process information (Huddy,

Feldman, and Cassese 2007) and more directional in how

they interpret new stimuli (Weeks 2015). Anger is an espe-

cially common feature in twenty-first-century American

Politics. Politicians routinely use anger in their public

speeches (De Castella and McGarty 2011). It disseminates

across social media platforms more quickly than other

types of emotional statements (Fan et al. 2014), and each

new election cycle is considered the most negative in

recent memory (Geer 2012). Anger is perhaps the most

commonly felt emotions in politics (Mattes et al. 2018).

Why are Americans so angry? There are several pos-

sible explanations for the current level of vitriol in our

politics, including the alignment of our various, mutu-

ally re-enforcing social identities into “mega-identities”

(Huddy, Mason, and Aaroe 2015; Mason 2016), policy

differences between political parties (MacKuen et al.

2010), the fracturing of the media environment and rise

of the internet as a news source (Webster 2020), and the

re-emergence of racial attitudes as powerful drivers of

mass attitudes (Abramowitz and Webster 2018).

However, another possible explanation is that the public

responds to angry appeals from politicians who use

anger as part of a strategic effort to rally support among

their base.

While political science has focused a great deal of

attention on the intra-personal influence of emotions,

another pathway for emotions to be influential in politics

is through how they are spread through inter-personal

influence from one person to another (Van Kleef 2016),

especially downward from political elites to the mass

electorate. The idea that the electorate takes cues from

political elites when forming their own political opinions

and attitudes is not new (Lenz 2012). However, less

understood is the degree to which political elites can

directly influence the emotional state of the electorate

through their own emotional expressions.

Strategically, politicians derive a great deal of benefit

from having angry partisans. Indeed, anger makes peo-

ple more engaged in politics (Valentino et al. 2011;

Valentino, Gregorowicz, and Groenendyk 2009), and

using public displays of anger to rally the partisans in the

mass electorate can ensure that lawmakers have a united

and energetic base come the next election cycle. Building

from the theoretical concepts of affect linkage (Elfenbein

2014) and the idea that emotions play an important

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26972PRQXXX10.1177/10659129211026972Political Research QuarterlyStapleton and Dawkins

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1University of Colorado Boulder, USA

2United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Carey E. Stapleton, University of Colorado Boulder, Ketchum Hall,

333 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0333, USA.

Emails: carey.stapleton@colorado.edu; carey.stapleton@gmail.com

Catching My Anger: How Political Elites

Create Angrier Citizens

Carey E. Stapleton1 and Ryan Dawkins2

Abstract

Anger is a common feature in contemporary American politics. Through the process of affect linkage, we argue that

one way the electorate becomes angrier about politics is by observing angry displays from political elites. Affect linkage

occurs when a person’s emotional state of mind changes to match the emotions displayed by someone else. Using an

online experiment in which subjects are randomly exposed to an angry or unemotional debate between a Democrat

and Republican running for Congress, we show that exposure to an angry in-party politician significantly increases

the amount of anger, disgust, and outrage expressed by co-rank-and-file partisans. This increase in aversive emotions,

moreover, increases the likelihood that citizens report the intention to vote, and this affect linkage effect is most

pronounced in those who are most likely to stay home on election day: the weakest partisans. Interestingly, angry

rhetoric by political elites does not have any effect on out-partisans, suggesting that anger via emotional contagion

does not cross party lines.

Keywords

emotion, anger, American politics, rhetoric, communication

2022, Vol. 75(3) 754–765

Article