Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

The Impact of Emotion on Political Participation: Testing the moderating effects of news consumption and political knowledge

A line of literature has explored what drive political participation. This study focuses on the impact of emotional states towards Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the two so-called outsiders as well as popular candidates of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party during the 2016 US Presidential Election, on political participation. In addition to emotion, the moderating effects of news consumption and political knowledge are also tested.

The survey data analyzed in this study were collected in 2016, using online survey panels administered by Survey Sampling International (SSI). This dataset contains 514 complete responses, and the sample reflects well the U.S. adult population in terms of gender, age, educational level, and race.
Previous studies show that both positive and negative emotional states can trigger actions. The two motivational systems argue that behavioral activation systems (BAS) is sensitive to signals of reward. People tend to approach people or activities when they experience positive events and effects, such as hope, elation, and happiness. On the contrary, when behavioral inhibition system (BIS) is activated, people are more likely to avoid other people or activities because they experience more negative affects (Gray, 1981). However, Carver (2004) argues that feelings relating to approach system are not always positive. For instance, anger will be anticipated to trigger risk-seeking behavior while anxiety will be expected to risk-avoidance behavior (Lerner & Kelner, 2000).

News consumption and political knowledge are also two key predictors of political participation. Through investigating empirical studies, Kanervo, Zhang, and Sawyer (2005) found that both newspaper reading and television viewing are positively linked to efficacy, interest, and political and civic participation. In addition to traditional news use, Nainan, Wen, Hao, and Cherian (2013) found that news consumption on the new and social media platform also appeared to contribute to political participation. As a associated predictor with news consumption, political knowledge is also considered as a significant predictor of political participation. People need to know what’s going on about political issues because this information facilitates their evaluations of public policies and debates and informs their attitudes and political preference (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Ondercin and Jones-White (2011) found that the gender gap in political participation disappears when women have a higher level of political knowledge.

This paper found that only positive emotional states can predict participation and negative emotions did not. In addition, although news consumption and political knowledge are positively correlated, news consumption positively whereas political knowledge negatively predicted participation. Regarding the moderating effect, news consumption positively moderates the relationship between positive emotion towards Trump and online mobilization. Most importantly, the results show that political knowledge positively moderates the relationship between positive emotion towards Sanders and online mobilization but negatively moderates the positive emotion towards Trump on online mobilization and offline participation.