The Secret: Make the Voters Hopeful

September 13, 2007

Election campaigns often play up the "fear factor" among voters, but new research shows they have underestimated the power of hope.

A new study by the University of Southern California's Ann Crigler, and colleagues Marion Just at Wellesley and Todd Belt at the University of Hawaii, finds that hope about a candidate is a particularly powerful emotion that motivates voters.

"It turns out that hope is the emotion most predictive of a person's voting preference," said Crigler, who is chair of the department of political science at USC. "When it comes to emotions in politics, the focus has been on fear, anger or anxiety. But hope is a transformative emotion. It allows you to go to a better place, to move forward, and that is why it resonates so much with voters."

The study, "Don't Give Up Hope: Emotions, Candidate Appraisals, and Votes," was published in The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior from the University of Chicago Press (2007), which Crigler co-edited.

The goal of the book, say Crigler and her co-editors, is to draw attention to the large role emotion plays in politics, which has been a neglected area in the study of political behavior. Their hope is to get political scientists to take emotion seriously and to broaden the study of political science.

"Many scholars view emotion as getting in the way of making clear choices," said Crigler. "But politics are all about decision-making, and emotion is critical to any kind of decision-making. Can you imagine trying to make a choice if you had no affect or attachment?"

The book's various chapters by leading experts — from fields such as neuroscience, philosophy and psychology — examine how emotion affects the way citizens either engage or withdraw from politics.

For the chapter on hope, Crigler and colleagues looked at the 1996 presidential campaign and analyzed how emotional perceptions of citizens about candidates influenced voter choices and expectations about the results.

During five different phases of the presidential election of 1996 (incumbent Bill Clinton v. challenger Bob Dole), the researchers surveyed more than 1,000 voters at a time. They measured respondents' emotions toward candidates by posing questions using words such as "angry," "hopeful," "afraid," "worried," "respectful" and "enthusiastic."

Their findings:

1. Hope is the most important emotion in the campaign.
2. Hope for one candidate is closely related to fear of the opposing candidate.
3. Voters compensate for their increasing hope of a favored candidate by building a negative image of the opponent.
4. Hope biases information search by voters.
5. Biased information acquisition and perception may lead to false hope regarding election outcomes.

Crigler's co-editors on the book are W. Russell Neuman, a professor of media technology in the department of communication studies and the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan; George E. Marcus, a professor of political science at Williams College; and Michael Mackuen, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill.