The Effects of Populist Emotive Appeals Within Direct-Democratic Campaigning

Abstract

A substantial body of literature has shown that emotive appeals affect citizens' voting behavior. This study addresses the question of whether emotive appeals can affect citizens during homogeneous, intense, and emotive campaigning. We conduct an experiment that manipulates the emotive contents of populist campaign communication during two Swiss direct-democratic campaigns: a proposed ban on minaret construction and a proposed ban on arms exports. The results are mixed, but show the importance of campaign concept accessibility in one's cognition. Although the emotive contents of populist campaign communication advocating the arms exports initiative enhance attention, for the remaining scenarios, campaign accessibility triggers attention regardless of the emotive argumentation contents. Emotive contents tend to influence vote choice for either advocacy campaign, if the campaign is cognitively accessible to the subject. These nuanced results highlight the complexity of the interaction of campaign accessibility and emotive campaigns.

KEYWORDS:

• direct-democratic campaigns
• emotions
• information processing
• populist communication