Do Elite Appeals to Negative Partisanship Stimulate Citizen Engagement?
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Mia Costa
, Hannah K. Frater
Abstract
Scholars have extensively studied whether campaign attack advertisements –messages that attack individual candidates– mobilize or demobilize voters with mixed results. We argue that group-oriented partisan affect in campaigns –messages about the parties in general– is just as important given increasing trends of affective polarization. We use two survey experiments, one right before the 2020 presidential election and the other before the subsequent Georgia Senate runoff election, to examine the effects of partisan rhetoric on several measures of civic engagement. In the presidential election, neither positive partisan, negative partisan, nor personal apartisan appeals had a statistically significant effect on voters’ enthusiasm, likelihood to volunteer, or likelihood to seek out more information about engaging in the election. In the second study, negative partisan appeals led registered voters in Georgia to report much higher levels of enthusiasm about their preferred candidate, but this result was driven by Republicans only. The findings contribute new insights about electoral context and asymmetric affective polarization to the literature documenting the mobilizing effects of negativity in campaigns.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2022-2042).
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction: Volume 20 Issue 1: Public Opinion in America
- Articles
- Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980–2020
- Collective Narcissism and Perceptions of the (Il)legitimacy of the 2020 US Election
- Two Sides of the Same Coin? Race, Racial Resentment, and Public Opinion Toward Financial Compensation of College Athletes
- Public Perceptions of the Supreme Court: How Policy Disagreement Affects Legitimacy
- Do Elite Appeals to Negative Partisanship Stimulate Citizen Engagement?
- Who Are Leaners? How True Independents Differ from the Weakest Partisans and Why It Matters
- Nationalism in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’: Race, Ethnicity, and National Attachment
- The Social Foundations of Public Support for Political Compromise
- Books Reviews
- Meghan Condon, and Amber Wichowsky: The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination
- Daniel W. Drezner: The Toddler-in-Chief: What Donald J. Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Introduction: Volume 20 Issue 1: Public Opinion in America
- Articles
- Explanations for Inequality and Partisan Polarization in the U.S., 1980–2020
- Collective Narcissism and Perceptions of the (Il)legitimacy of the 2020 US Election
- Two Sides of the Same Coin? Race, Racial Resentment, and Public Opinion Toward Financial Compensation of College Athletes
- Public Perceptions of the Supreme Court: How Policy Disagreement Affects Legitimacy
- Do Elite Appeals to Negative Partisanship Stimulate Citizen Engagement?
- Who Are Leaners? How True Independents Differ from the Weakest Partisans and Why It Matters
- Nationalism in the ‘Nation of Immigrants’: Race, Ethnicity, and National Attachment
- The Social Foundations of Public Support for Political Compromise
- Books Reviews
- Meghan Condon, and Amber Wichowsky: The Economic Other: Inequality in the American Political Imagination
- Daniel W. Drezner: The Toddler-in-Chief: What Donald J. Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency