Emotional Campaigning in Politics: Being Moved and Anger in Political Ads Motivate to Support Candidate and Party

Political campaigning is an inherent part of politics to recruit support from voters. Video advertisement for a political candidate or party has been a widely used method for many years, distributed via television and online, including social media. This type of advertisement attempts to recruit support by presenting convincing arguments and evoking various emotions about the candidate, opponents, and policy proposals. In the present paper, we review existing work on what emotions are most prevalent, focusing particularly on anger and enthusiasm. We discuss recent arguments and evidence that a specific social emotion, namely the concept kama muta, plays a role in political advertisements. In vernacular language, kama muta is typically labeled being moved or touched. Seminal video examples from the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns are known to evoke this emotion. We compare anger and kama muta theoretically and discuss how they can influence voters’ willingness to support a candidate. We then, for the first time, compare kama muta and anger empirically in the same study. Specifically, we showed American participants short political ads from the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that either evoked anger or kama muta and came from either Democratic or Republican candidates. We assessed participants' degree of being angered and moved by the videos and their motivation for three types of political support: ideational, financial and personal. Participants were more angered by the selected anger-evoking videos and more moved by the selected moving videos of the party which they identified with more. They were also more motivated to support the advertised candidate and party in different ways if either emotion was elicited. If an emotion was evoked, its effect on political support was largely independent from the prior support for the party. In other words, elicitation, but not impact, of an emotion is moderated by prior social identification in the context of political advertisement. We discuss limitations of the method and implications of the results for future research and practice.