Rosema, Martin

English

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How passionate is the electorate? A study of emotion based voting in party-centered politics.

The last quarter of a century has brought a stream of research that shows that voters’ choices at the polls are strongly influenced by their emotions. The evidence, however, is almost exclusively based on data concerning candidate-centered elections, in particular those for the American presidency. This paper examines the role of emotions in party-centered politics. It utilises data from the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study 2006, which asked voters to rate their feelings of enthusiasm, anxiety (worry), irritation, and pride for three major political parties. These measures help explain party evaluations, even if social identity, ideology, and policy preferences are taken into account. In line with the theory of affective intelligence, voters whose primary emotional response was one of anxiety showed stronger effects of cognitive factors, in particular perceived ideological agreement. Contrary to expectations, negative feelings as indicated by low evaluation scores were not so much the result of irritation or worry, but of the absence of enthusiasm. This suggests that feeling thermometer scales are not bipolar measures of positive and negative affect, but unipolar measures of positive affect

How passionate is the electorate? A study of emotion based voting in party-centered politics.

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