Do Negatively Framed Messages Motivate Political Participation? Evidence From Four Field Experiments

• Date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X19840732
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X19840732

American Politics Research

2020, Vol. 48(1) 3 –21

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X19840732

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Article

Do Negatively Framed

Messages Motivate

Political Participation?

Evidence From Four

Field Experiments

Christopher B. Mann1, Kevin Arceneaux2,

and David W. Nickerson2

Abstract

A multitude of laboratory experiments show that subtle shifts in framing can

induce individuals to participate in political activity. Using four randomized

field experiments, we tested whether exposure to messages framing public

policy proposals negatively increased political action relative to exposure to

messages framing the proposal positively. Three experiments use a type of

political participation novel to the field experiments literature: phone calls

recruiting people to contact elected officials. Contrary to expectations from

prior laboratory experiments on intention to participate in collective action

in politics, we find scant evidence that messages framed negatively about the

policy returns from participation are more effective than messages framed

positively about the policy returns from participation at motivating real-

world political behavior.

Keywords

political behavior, framing, negativity bias, field experiment, policy returns

to participation

1Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA

2Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Christopher B. Mann, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA.

Email: cmann@skidmore.edu

840732APRXXX10.1177/1532673X19840732American Politics ResearchMann et al.

research-article2019

4 American Politics Research 48(1)

The vast majority of citizens’ only opportunities to participate in the political

process are through acts such as voting in regular elections and communicat-

ing opinions to representatives (e.g., contacting elected officials, attending

community meetings, engaging in public protest, etc.) and many field experi-

ments demonstrate that personal blandishments by a stranger can induce

some individuals to participate (e.g., Green & Gerber, 2015). Civic and polit-

ical organizations seeking to increase these forms of participation frequently

frame the reasons to participate negatively (i.e., harm, damage, threat, loss)

or positively (i.e., benefits, improvement, aspiration, gain) about salient pub-

lic policy outcomes. Although there is considerable evidence from laboratory

experiments in political science and other fields that negative frames should

produce larger effects, we are not aware of any prior research that compares

negative versus positive frames in field experiments about policy returns

from real-world participation in politics.

In this article, we evaluate whether employing negative or positive frames

to describe policy proposals better motivates citizens to engage in political

behavior in the real-world collective action settings of voting and contacting

their elected representatives. Contrary to expectations from laboratory exper-

iments, we find little-to-no evidence supporting the hypothesis that nega-

tively framed messages about policy returns will increase real-world

participation in collective action in politics for the overall population or any

subgroup.

Although some prior field experiments comparing frames for encouraging

real-world political behavior have found few differences between competing

frames (Arceneaux & Nickerson, 2010; Bhatti, Dahlgaard, Hansen, &

Hansen, 2018; Gerber, Huber, Fang, & Reardon, 2018; Green and Gerber,

2015; Mann, 2010; Nickerson, 2007), the failure to find successful frames

might be due to these previous comparisons using weak and atheoretical dis-

tinctions between the treatments. Field experiment manipulations more

firmly rooted in behavioral theory have found that concepts such as account-

ability (Gerber, Green, & Larimer, 2008; Panagopoulos, 2011a), identity

(Valenzuela & Michelson, 2016), and implementation intentions (Nickerson

& Rogers, 2010) can motivate real-world behavior better than typical appeals.

Several streams of research in economics, psychology, and political sci-

ence provide a firm theoretical foundation for the prediction that negative

frames should motivate political behavior more than positive frames. First,

people have a general predisposition to privilege negative information over

positive information (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014), and as a result,

emphasizing the negative aspects of policy proposals tends have a stronger

and more lasting effect on policy opinions than emphasizing the positive

(Cobb & Kuklinski, 1997). Second, people’s tendency for “losses [to] loom