The Power of Politicians’ Positive Emotional Appeals

Do emotional appeals of politicians affect voting? Despite deep historical concerns thatthey do, the evidence for this is limited. Therefore we ask: what are the effects ofdifferent forms of emotional appeals on vote choice, also taking into account different(political) contexts and preferences? To answer this question, we integrate perspectivesfrom political science, psychology and communication science and propose a wide range ofpreregistered hypotheses. To test them we introduce an innovative Leader Choice Task,i.e., a visual conjoint experiment displaying two election posters simultaneously. Eachelection poster shows a political candidate with a manipulated emotional expression,a statement regarding different political issues with different positions on that issue,varying emotional tone. we embedded this task in 9 online survey experiments andone lab experiment (total N = 12,108) conducted in the Netherlands, Poland, Greeceand the United States. Across the 10 studies, we find consistent evidence that peopleare attracted by positive emotional appeals (in tone and expression) and disapprove ofnegative emotional appeals. These effects hold across different manipulations of issuecongruence, issue salience, threat-related issues, slogans, politicians’ facial dominance,intuitive vs deliberative contexts, government versus opposition politicians and countries.The only strong moderator we find is ideology: among right-wing participant candidateswith negative tone are more popular than among left-wing and centrist participants.Taken together, our findings demonstrate the persuasive power of positive emotionalappeals, an important message in a time of increasing negativity in politics