There is a distinct sense in recent years that politics has become a highly emotive topic, with politicians using emotions heavily in their campaigning to try and drum up support.  Research from Heidelberg University in Germany suggests, however, that while such emotion-driven adverts may be good at bolstering one’s existing support, it seldom attracts new support.

Volunteers were shown various short political video adverts that were designed to either anger the viewer or move them emotionally.  In all, eight videos were shown, four each from Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2018 midterms.

An emotive response

The results show that the ads were certainly effective in terms of eliciting an emotional response, but that this response typically results in them deepening their support for their own side.

“At a very general level, it may be surprising to some people that political ads are not all attack ads,” the researchers say. “Even in today’s polarized political climate, many ads attempt to inspire and move their target audience.”

Whereas the researchers say that previous work suggests that adverts targeting a more moving response can be effective at helping cross partisan lines, this was not something they observed.  They suggest this could be because the previous election was the 2016 presidential campaign featuring Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and so featured stronger messaging.

The study was also quite subtle in terms of not explicitly stating which party was responsible for each ad, which resulted in people having to guess, which they weren’t always able to do successfully.  Interestingly, however, even when people were wrong, the ads still had the same kind of emotional influence on people as if it was actually from their preferred party.

The authors believe that this illustrates the importance of adverts being quite clear who is behind them to prevent unwittingly bolstering support for their opponents.  If the desire is to convert supporters of opposing parties, however, then emotional ads don’t appear to be the way to go.