Tell Us How You Feel: Emotional Appeals for Votes in Presidential Primaries

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221106432
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(5) 609–622

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221106432

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Tell Us How You Feel: Emotional Appeals for

Votes in Presidential Primaries

Zachary A. Scott

1

and Jared McDonald

2



Abstract

Emotions are an important feature of representation, as they allow politicians to ref‌lect the feelings of their constituents. Yet

studies of elites’use of emotions have been conf‌ined to examinations of strategic incentives. We build on these studies by

incorporating elites’group identities as a theoretical consideration. Our theory blends perspectives on the group identities of

partisanship, gender, and race with political psychology research on emotions. We hypothe size that Republicans use more fear

and disgust language than Democrats, that women candidates use more joy language than men candidates, and that Black

candidates use less anger than white candidates. We test these hypotheses by applying emotional sentiment dictionari es to a

corpus of primary candidates’speeches. The evidence supports our claim that Republicans use more fear and that women use

more joy, but we f‌ind no signif‌icant differences in the use of disgust and anger language by partisanship and race, respectively.

Keywords

campaigns, emotions, elite rhetoric, presidential primaries

Introduction

A large and growing body of literature shows that emotional

cues are powerful motivators of political behavior (e.g.,

Groenendyk & Banks, 2014;Phoenix, 2019;Valentino et al.,

2011). Left implied by many of these works is that political

elites employ emotions routinely and reliably. Jerit (2004)

suggests a “survival of the f‌ittest”feature to campaign

rhetoric, where emotional appeals survive over alternatives

because they allow candidates to emphasize universal values

while capturing media attention. But might candidates face

constraints on their ability to utilize emotions?

This question is largely unanswered, though by no means

unimportant. Democratic theorists emphasize legislative

outcomes and descriptive features as key forms of repre-

sentation (Canes-Wrone et al., 2002;Mansbridge, 2003;

Pitkin, 1967), but legislative outcomes are not the only way

constituent attitudes are ref‌lected by political leaders. When

politicians and citizens share particular emotions about

government and society, it can lead to stronger perceptions

that the politician is “one of us”(McDonald, 2021;Tremblay,

2019). Yet studies of the attitudinal and behavioral ramif‌i-

cations of emotions far outpace studies of the volume and

content of emotions in the political communication envi-

ronment (but see Borah, 2016;Brader, 2006;Jerit, 2004;

Ridout & Searles, 2011), making it diff‌icult to assess whether

political elites are responsive to the emotions felt by the

masses. This paper seeks to close that gap. And it does so in

the context of presidential primaries, an understudied yet

important electoral situation, and by drawing on speeches by

the candidates themselves, a form of candidate communi-

cation not considered by the handful of aforementioned

studies.

The few existing studies of elite emotional cues tend to

focus on how situational factors like candidates’poll standing

or the competitiveness of the race structure strategic incen-

tives (Brader, 2006;Ridout & Searles, 2011). Our theoretical

expectations compliment these studies by additively incor-

porating the valuable perspectives of literatures on group

identities (Phoenix, 2019). Because many voters rely on

group cue heuristics when thinking about politics (Converse,

1964) and because group-specif‌ic socialization processes

inculcate different values and norms (Hughes, 2003;

Margolis, 2018;Witt, 1997), we argue that the group iden-

tities of candidates should meaningfully affect emotional

rhetoric. If group identities inf‌luence the emotional rhetoric

politicians can effectively convey, it has important implica-

tions for the way they represent constituents.

This argument leads us to several specif‌ic hypotheses.

Because the Republican electorate exhibits anxiety that

1

Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

2

University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Zachary A. Scott, Politics and International Affairs, Wake Forest University,

Winston-Salem, NC, USA.

Email: scottz@wfu.edu