Tell Us How You Feel: Emotional Appeals for Votes in Presidential Primaries

Abstract

Emotions are an important feature of representation, as they allow politicians to reflect the feelings of their constituents. Yet studies of elites’ use of emotions have been confined to examinations of strategic incentives. We build on these studies by incorporating elites’ group identities as a theoretical consideration. Our theory blends perspectives on the group identities of partisanship, gender, and race with political psychology research on emotions. We hypothesize that Republicans use more fear and disgust language than Democrats, that women candidates use more joy language than men candidates, and that Black candidates use less anger than white candidates. We test these hypotheses by applying emotional sentiment dictionaries to a corpus of primary candidates’ speeches. The evidence supports our claim that Republicans use more fear and that women use more joy, but we find no significant differences in the use of disgust and anger language by partisanship and race, respectively.