Ted Brader

The Effects of Emotional Appeals in Campaign Ads

Politicians routinely appeal to emotions. Nowhere is this more true than in the campaign ads that flood our television sets every election. In 1984, Ronald Reagan’s campaign encouraged feelings of hope and pride using sentimental music and colorful scenes from small-town America. In 2004, George W. Bush, John Kerry, and their allies tried to arouse fear and anger with images of war and terrorism. We have long been warned that these sorts of emotional appeals are cheap tricks designed to manipulate naive voters into feeling good about one candidate and bad about the other, instead of making a rational decision based on the issues. This conventional wisdom, however, is wrong. In fact, even though campaigns have always targeted emotions, we know almost nothing about how these tactics work.

This project is the first scientific study of how politicians influence voters by appealing to their emotions. I document a number of common beliefs about these tactics and then explain how recent research in psychology and neuroscience leads us to expect a more subtle, but equally powerful, role for emotion in political communication. To test these expectations, I draw on evidence from experiments conducted during an actual election and systematic analysis of over fourteen hundred ads used in recent campaigns. The results challenge conventional notions about how ads work, whom they affect, and whether they are bad for democracy. While politicians indeed use music, images, and rhetoric to stir emotions, their impact depends on which emotions are evoked. Feel-good ads that elicit enthusiasm, hope, and pride motivate voters to get involved, but they also reinforce existing loyalties and help polarize the electorate. Fear ads can be tools of persuasion, but they also cause voters to seek out information and reconsider their choices in light of available evidence. Surprisingly, emotional appeals exert their greatest impact on citizens who know the most about politics. The findings suggest not only the importance of emotions in campaign politics, but also the need to rethink knee-jerk criticism of politicians for “preying on the hopes and fears” of voters.

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The Strategic Use and Impact of Emotion in Ad Campaigns

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Gender Stereotypes and Emotional Appeals

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Acoustic Properties of Campaign Ads as Emotional Cues

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