Exploring Emotions in Presidential Elections with Heather Yates | BRI Scholar Talks

0:05 For this episode of Scholar Talks, the guiding question is what role do emotions play in presidential campaigns and elections? Our guest is Heather Yates, a professor of political science at the University of Central Arkansas and the author of several books, including The Politics of Emotions Candidates and Choices,

0:27 as well as The Politics of Spectacle and Emotions in the 2016 presidential campaign. I am Tony Williams, senior fellow at the Bill of Rights Institute, and I am pleased to bring you another episode in the American government and civics series. Heather,I want to thank you very much for joining me. My pleasure. Tony. Thanks for having me.

0:49 Well, I mean, I was so fascinated by your books, for a couple of reasons. One is you have just such interesting case studies for recent elections, which are just so interesting. And one. We’ll get to those. But the idea, you know, you really challenged me to think, and that’s sort of the point of, of learning. Right. And reading new books is that, you know, you challenged me to, to rethink perhaps

1:11 the positive role that emotions can play in presidential campaigns, elections. So, so I’m, I’m very pleased to have you on. Thank you. I’m glad to be here to talk about this subject. Right. Well, let’s jump right in. Kind of a big question. There’s so much I want to talk about. So. So what role do emotions play in presidential campaigns and elections,

1:34 and how can emotions compliment the traditional idea of the rational, informed voter. I love this question because a lot of the motivation behind me taking on this research was to address that presupposition people have about emotions and politics, that they are negative

1:55 and that anytime you’re being emotional, you’re being irrational. And I wanted to challenge that thinking a little bit to demonstrate that there is a connection between thinking and feeling. There’s a connection between feeling and thinking. And so emotions have a great deal of of influence over everyday decision making, not just political decision making, but I apply that to the political context.

2:15 And so a lot of the research that I pull from comes from social psychology and the social psychology research demonstrated through their methodology of basically, controlled, experiments, was that thinking and feeling are connected. But what’s fascinating about human emotions is that they precede judgment.

2:36 They precede thinking. So oftentimes voters or just citizens know how they feel about something before they can actually articulate the reasoning behind how they feel that. And I think it’s also important to note that it’s just how our brains are wired to function, to keep us alive and healthy in social situations. Our brains are constantly assessing our environments for threats.

3:00 There’s a constant we’re making judgments of it. So a safe environment is a dangerous environment. And our brains don’t really make that connection, that we’re in different environments when we’re talking about the marketplace of politics and the political campaigns. And so our emotions do a great deal and give us a lot of servicing to help our judgment by helping us signal what’s a threat, what’s a foe, what’s a friend,

3:23 what is something that’s going to harm us or what is something we need to pay attention to? So we’re constantly serving that environment. Okay great. So. So why are campaigns and elections seemingly at least becoming a lot more emotional? And do campaigns themselves appeal to the emotions or play on them?

3:44 And finally, if it’s not too much, you know, what role does the media and especially social media today play in evoking these emotions? Sure. Yeah. I will take the media question and kind of infuse that with my my answer about, why does it seem like campaigns are becoming more emotional? Because it really does seem like once upon a time some of us can remember

4:07 maybe an era in which it didn’t seem as emotional as it is. But I really like to pause for a second and discuss campaigns of the 19th century. Right? You know, there was a lot of emotive campaigning, in the era before modern technology and the the fascinating, compelling factoid about historical campaigns

4:29 is a lot of times they were sources of community entertainment. It’d be a Sunday afternoon and a candidate would show up at the church yard. It was not illegal to give your potential voters, booze, alcohol, cider. You know, they called it cider. Cider campaigning. Right. You know, and and so it just sounded like a wild time

4:49 in which would be a family affair. And you show up and you listen to a candidate bash the opposition. And because it was in, it was a source of entertainment. It was also, played out in the press. It’s a different medium than what we have now. I think why a lot of political watchers might assess campaigns becoming more emotional. I think it has a couple of things to do with one political polarization.

5:12 There’s been a slow moving Partizan polarization happening really, since I think we can point to 1994. And so, that evolves into then campaigns being kind of a team sport or you team Red or you team blue, and then we that evolves into what we now have, on the platform that we talk about negative partisanship Right.

5:34 It’s not necessarily being negative, but it’s despising the opposition so much that it consolidates and galvanizes your loyalty to your current Partizan affiliation. And then that gets played out among our social networks, online, on digital platforms. And so it creates an echo chamber effect. And so that amplifies and intensifies coupled by the evolution

5:58 of the information industry, the news media, the broadcast news media too, I, I don’t go into this in great detail in my books because there’s a plethora of scholars who study just this, but I think it is necessary to discuss just the information for profit industry, you know, so the news industry moved from information as public service to information for profit.

6:21 And what is going to compel people to act emotive cues. And so we know a lot of thing basic things about emotions and how they work within our cognition is something that I will mention is that certain emotions provide more external motivation than others. And that’s usually negative emotions or externalizing. And so if you can cue up negative emotions in your viewing audience,

6:45 that is going to compel them to one, pay attention a little bit more. If you’re online, it drives clicks on stories, salacious headlines draw clicks. And I really think it’s a conflation. It’s a combination of all of these factors mixing together to kind of create the current landscape in which we are navigating now,

7:06 which seems like it’s a little bit more emotional because we are more focused on emotional cues, personalities, personality traits, the personalization of our politics, and maybe less on deliberating what economic policies really mean for us, what pocketbook issues really mean for us. The prices at the grocery store, what that really means for us.

7:26 So we’re not really deliberating that in the same way that we probably did 3 or 4 decades ago. All right. So then as a follow up, are campaigns purposefully packaging their candidates like that to be more candidate focused rather than sort of, you know, sort of issue driven towards, or sort of more rational side of things.

7:47 I’m glad you asked that question, Tony, because I do want to talk about, how the evolution of the candidates centric campaign is also contributing to this. Right? Because prior to, loosely prior to the 1960s, it was more party driven. So people were self referencing their politics in terms of do they identify as Democrat or Republican? And now, with the evolution

8:10 of the hyper intensive focus on just the candidate as the standard bearer, leading leader of the ticket and becoming the standard bearer of the party per se, the symbolic leader of the party, voters are now referencing themselves. Or positioning themselves spatially in their head space to which, you know, can’t base that they fall into.

8:31 Who do they support? More to the point that they even self reference as being a fan instead of a supporter of a particular candidate. And that is very telling, right? So I think the evolution of candidate center campaigns, really amplified by the hyper focus that the broadcast media now also places on,

8:53 the candidates personalities, their personal traits, their scandals. And also, I should probably loop in like digital press is now followed suit into that. So I absolutely, fully believe that that plays effect to to to answer the ultimate question, do candidates purposefully use this as a strategy?

9:13 Absolutely. Candidate rhetoric. There’s a lot of good, research on the uses of, candidate rhetoric and how emotive they are. And it’s not just candidate rhetoric, too. There’s a lot of research being done on members of Congress and House and Senate floor speeches are also using a lot of emotive, laden language, meaning what if a lot of value judgment, value laden language being used to evoke

9:36 very specific reactions from those who are, viewing the footage. And most of it leans to the negative because what do we know psychologically about negative emotions? They are more externalizing. They are more likely to produce action. They’re more likely honestly to emotions or to function like motivated reasoning. And so yeah, so candidates and officeholders

10:00 are going to use negative language, and static language and, and inflammatory language to get to that, that motivation, to get somebody really mad because they’re going to pay attention more rather than if they’re coming back and coming away from that feeling really happy, settled, proud.

10:20 Yeah. So it also has to do with the attention span of our viewing audience as well. Negative emotions keep people glued to the TV screen. All right, very good, so much , for mourning in America. I know we’re we’re still we’re still waiting. Hopeful for that. Right right right. very good All right.

10:41 Well, well, let’s stick around with some of those great case studies from your book. So, in your books, in, in 2004, the strongest feelings seem to be associated with national security issues during the war on terror, the war in Afghanistan, and then the newly waged war in Iraq. So can you tell us a little bit about since 2004?

11:02 Yeah, 2004 was really a fascinating case study for the reason that it was the first presidential election after nine over 11. It is the first time that the United States electorate is weighing in on George W Bush, is now a wartime president. And there was a two front war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

11:23 But what was fascinating about that election was that the, Bush campaign, really tried to de-emphasize those two wars or that two front war and focus more on domestic issues. Well, what’s compelling in the data is that it had mixed results

11:43 is that all of the domestic issues that were coupled really with what we call, the culture war or morality politics, while they were maybe overemphasized, voters rarely had Iraq and Afghanistan on their mind. And in the 2004 case study, there was only four of emotional dimensions tested.

12:03 And that was two negatives. So that was anger and fear and then two positive. And that was hope and pride. And what we see with George W Bush is and how I tested this is that I was looking for something called basically the candidate affect response, which essentially means it’s how do voters or how did the respondents to the survey, how did they feel about George W Bush

12:23 and did those feelings about George W Bush? Did they like them, hate them? How’d it make them feel emotionally? Then did those feelings get projected on to campaign issues? And they did. And so that’s what I’m finding is that voters are taking their cues from their camp, their candidate, or the candidates in the campaigns, and then they project those assessments

12:45 and those judgments of the candidate onto their issues. And so what I found is that, anger and fear were predominant emotions playing out in voters minds. And that was anger and fear towards George W Bush. On the specific question of Iraq and Afghanistan and how that question was asked, is it is that military engagement worth the cost?

13:09 However, the respondent interpreted cost? Was that a human cost, economic cost that was open to interpretation. But what we see is that it is overwhelmingly negative. There’s one more thing that I want to point out about how negative emotions were playing out in political landscapes, and this is pretty much true across all the years of all the cycles that I studied, was that negative emotions tend to correlate

13:34 with retrospective voting, and positive aspirational emotions correlated with prospective voting, which would make sense because any time somebody’s looking forward, they’re trying to be aspirational. But yeah, so on the military, domestic security and international security questions, there was, two, two emotions that played out very significantly.

13:54 And that was fear and anger. And mostly a lot of it was also fear. Fear type type tends to edge anger out a little bit. But these are two different emotions in terms of how they psychologically get activated and the type of behavior and cognition that they motivate. But yeah, so in 2004, that was really what was compelling is that the actual campaign narrative coming out of the Bush camp was

14:18 domestic issues, social issues, morality issues. But that doesn’t really register as profoundly in the data in the survey data. So I thought that was really fascinating. Right? Yes, just for sure. So, and tees up, prospective, retrospective, tees up. I think, 2008. Really.

14:38 Well, so in 2008, historic election, in a lot of ways, what were some of the strongest emotions evoked during the campaign? I mean, really, the financial crisis, certainly race, gender, several important issues. So 2008, once again, another compelling case study right after 2004, we do have,

15:01 on both tickets, Republican and Democrat, very historic nominations. Democrats nominate Barack Obama and Republicans, with McCain nominate Sarah Palin as the VP candidate. So very historic watershed moment. And what’s really compelling about 2008 is that Barack Obama, as the Democratic nominee

15:23 at that point in time, had been the first presidential candidate. Really, I’m going to say, since 1932, who campaigns solely on positive emotional dimensions in the wake of financial disaster. So something that is very, scary to a lot of Americans, infusing a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity.

15:43 And so therefore, anxieties would be high, although that’s not one of the emotional dimensions that were tested in 2008. But what we see is fascinating. We see some things from 2000 fourfold. We do see negative emotions correlate with retrospective, assessments. And so voters were assessing the incumbent party, the Republican Party, in very negative ways.

16:06 And then that just amplified at the end of September of 2008, because the particular survey data that I was using, all had been collected mostly before that market crash in the late, late election cycle. So even that variable not being accounted for, there is still an overwhelmingly negative perspective of the George W Bush campaign and the incumbent Republican Party.

16:29 Now, across all of my models that I tested, across all the issues that I tested, which are always going to be international military, domestic security and the social hope. Hope registers for Barack Obama. And so this is a direct thread from his narrative, his campaigning so fiercely on hope and change.

16:51 Absolutely is reflected back in the survey game. And so while we see, mostly anger register for the incumbent party, we really see statistically significant measures across all my models that Barack Obama’s messaging was very effective and it was very positive. And it’s that sort of aspirational.

17:12 And will we know that Barack Obama ultimately wins the presidency in 2008. So, case holds that aspirational feelings looking forward correlate with perspective voting. In that case. All right. Good and contrarily, let’s get to the 2016 election. So obviously that evoked a lot

17:33 of very strong emotion and a campaign that might be characterized, I think, in the, in one of the books as done, a crazy, sort of political spectacle. Right? With populism, immigration, economic nationalism, a lot of sort of very emotional or very personal issues, being played out,

17:55 especially on social media with, with sort of the rise of Twitter and so forth. So, do you want to speak about 2016. 2016 is once again another compelling case, like we have so like sandwiched together, every single one of these election cycles is offering something of a watershed moment in 2016. Is no no stranger to that.

18:17 So we have once again, another historic nomination on the Democratic side with its first woman to head a major party ticket. And then we have a political outsider coming right in with Donald Trump. And, at first, you know, everybody thought that he was a longshot in the primary, but he he cinches that nomination.

18:38 Here we are teed up for, once again, a very compelling, just historic election. Not to mention, now we have a little bit of, political theater happening because Donald Trump, no stranger to television, no stranger to being entertainment, he knew how to entertain. And so he knew how to bring in political theater and execute it flawlessly.

19:01 And then he also knew how to really engage the populous presidency. And he did with Twitter what I think FDR probably did with radio. And so he showed the political arena how to take in a relatively new ish digital platform and use it to pretty much run of campaign.

19:22 And he did not run a conventional campaign. Clinton did. He showed that he could practically campaign via Twitter, and it energizes a lot of party organizations at the state level in a way that no other candidate had. So we had what does that mean? That means people who had never been engaged in politics or to geopolitics were all of a sudden paying attention to politics,

19:42 because the spectacle, it becomes a source of entertainment. Like like our favorite campaigns from our 19th century examples. Right? It becomes a source of entertainment. It becomes something people are paying attention to, so their senses are heightened out of just interest. And, then what was fascinating with the survey data here

20:02 was that the negative type of emotions that Hillary Clinton evoked, a lot of respondents saw Hillary Clinton in very negative light. They were they were afraid. Fear registers in statistically significant ways, for Hillary Clinton, whereas the positive dimension, the aspirational dimensions of hope registered for Donald Trump in 2016.

20:26 So that was really fascinating. So that was telling us that voters do not see any kind of perceived threat from Donald Trump. They did see this perceived threat from Hillary Clinton. Now, that’s not in a vacuum, right? There’s at least three decades of Hillary Clinton having a reputation that preceded her. And that plays out. So that was what was really, really fascinating

20:48 and why it’s fascinating because we talked a little bit about media and we, we know, those of us who watched that election went through that election and watched it closely know that even during the Republican primary, how intensely focused print media and broadcast media and digital media were on Donald Trump for being that dark horse candidate, that outsider, that kind of renegade,

21:11 the anti-establishment candidate, everything that, a lot of Americans at the time that was resonating with them. And so Hillary Clinton represented establishment. Donald Trump represented anything outside of establishment. And so what was really, really fascinating is even though there was a lot of negative framing of Donald Trump and even in some cases, negative priming,

21:33 depending on which outlet we’re going to talk about. Right. So inviting their viewers to already negatively judge Donald Trump, it does not really resonate in the survey data, which is really compelling. So so sometimes I think broadcast media might like to think that they do, you know, pull some some strings on where public opinion goes.

21:53 In 2016, there was very favorable feelings towards Donald Trump. And that got projected onto a lot of policies that he floated in that election cycle. Right. Fascinating. So today we are in the middle of another very emotional campaign. So what do emotional campaigns and elections

22:15 mean for the heart of politics, for civil society, even just for conversation in how we’re relating to each other in the country? Because, yeah, it seems to me that it’s having somewhat of a, of a negative effect. But. I’ll, I’ll turn the question over to you. So this is where I get to parse out that emotions,

22:38 the role emotions have in our political cognition. Play has a very functional role, a role of utilitarianism, which we well, that we do not make judgments without our emotional side. However, at the aggregate level, right when we are coming together as a society or civil discourse, we are seeing some of the negative trends

22:59 coming from populism and the emotive aspects that populism brings. Some of the liabilities are manifesting, and there’s two that I can think of. One, less civil discourse. People are just less civil, less couple because of how they are self referencing politically. Are they referencing team R and are they referencing team D? Trump team Harris.

23:21 And therefore there’s this existential rejection of opposition and there’s no, attempt to try to understand somebody’s viewpoint different than their own. So that then is parlayed into the second observation that I make is that the highly emotive political landscape with,

23:44 both candidates, officeholders and supporters all using and adopting very inflammatory language in is making us less deliberative as a civic society and as our representative institution, there is very little deliberation. And I know I’m painting a broad brush and in the interest of time, but these are

24:06 these are the two observations that I have in terms of being liable, when emotions are not mediated, that language is not mediated. And when I say language, I mean rhetoric and that words do matter and words do have consequences. And those are the two observations that I’m seeing where we’re at right now. To offer just a little bit of sunshine, a little bit of hope.

24:27 What I am, what I am seeing those with this election cycle in 2024, which has been once again, we just keep amping up the intensity with every election cycle. That every election cycle tends to be more historic than the one previous and more historic, unusual things are happening. This particular one is no different. Different than that. I mean, we’ve had a very, very unusual election cycle to where I think it’s

24:52 with a lot of violence, and I think it’s capturing attention to where maybe, maybe we need to pay attention to some of the consequences and negative rhetoric for that fact. And how I’m seeing that manifest is that there is a a small attempt at talking more about policy rather than just running down the opposition. But yet again, every time I get hope, you know, the weekend cycle comes through.

25:13 And then somebody said something to denigrate their opposition. So, yeah, every Monday we start at square one, I guess. Okay, well, here’s hope with that. That emotion can be a very productive complement to the rational, informed voter as we deliberate together as Americans. So let’s all, maybe have a vote for that.

25:34 Yes, absolutely. Well said,, well said. Great. Heather Yates, thank you so much for joining us to discuss this important topic. Very timely, very important. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of Scholar Talks. Please check out the other interviews in our topics in American Government and Civics series on our channel.

25:56 thanks.