ABSTRACT
Negative campaigning motivates and persuades voters by appealing to their emotions. Negative campaigning not only evokes more emotional responses than positive campaigning but also different emotional responses. There is, however, limited knowledge about how these emotional responses differ across types of negative campaigning and across groups of voters. In this study, we examine the effect of various types of campaign attacks (attacks on competence, integrity, ideology and uncivil attacks) on voters' emotional responses, namely, anxiety, anger, contempt, pride and hope. We conducted a survey-embedded between-subjects experiment with a random sample of Americans. We find that campaign attacks increase the degree of anger, anxiety and contempt while reducing the degree of pride and hope. But the strength of emotional response varies depending on the type of attack, with uncivil attacks having the greatest impact.
