IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/2034.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Personal Emotions and Political Decision Making: Implications for Voter Competence

Author

Listed:
  • Healy, Andrew J.

    (Loyola Marymount University)

  • Malhotra, Neil

    (Stanford University)

  • Mo, Cecilia H.

    (Stanford University)

Abstract

According to what criteria do citizens make political decisions, and what do these criteria say about democratic competence? An impressive body of evidence suggests that voters competently evaluate diagnostic information such as macroeconomic trends and their personal financial circumstances to reward good performance while ridding themselves of leaders who are corrupt, incompetent, or ineffective. However, what if some voters' personal emotional reactions to events completely unrelated to public affairs influence their voting decisions? The conflation of personal emotions with political cognition challenges traditional conceptions of citizen competence and democratic accountability. We explore whether emotional reactions unrelated to incumbent performance affect voting behavior by assessing the electoral impact of local college football games, events that government has nothing to do with and for which no government response would be expected. On average, a win before Election Day causes the incumbent to receive about one percentage point more of the vote, with the effect being larger for teams with stronger fan support. We corroborate these aggregate-level results with a survey conducted during the 2009 NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament, where we find that sports-induced emotional change affects approval of President Obama and assessments of the health of the country. Voters' decisions and attitudes are thus shown to depend considerably on events that affect their personal level of happiness even when those events are entirely disconnected from government activity. Our results provide new evidence on the significant limitations of the electorate's capacity to hold elected officials accountable for their actions.

Suggested Citation

  • Healy, Andrew J. & Malhotra, Neil & Mo, Cecilia H., 2009. "Personal Emotions and Political Decision Making: Implications for Voter Competence," Research Papers 2034, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:2034
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP2034.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrew Leigh, 2009. "Does the World Economy Swing National Elections?," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 71(2), pages 163-181, April.
    2. Lerner, Jennifer & Han, Seunghee & Keltner, Dacher, 2007. "Feelings and Consumer Decision Making: Extending the Appraisal-Tendency Framework," Scholarly Articles 37143006, Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
    3. Kinder, Donald R. & Kiewiet, D. Roderick, 1981. "Sociotropic Politics: The American Case," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11(2), pages 129-161, April.
    4. Carnevale, Peter J. D. & Isen, Alice M., 1986. "The influence of positive affect and visual access on the discovery of integrative solutions in bilateral negotiation," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 1-13, February.
    5. Alice M. Isen & Andrew S. Rosenzweig & Mark J. Young, 1991. "The Influence of Positive Affect on Clinical Problem solving," Medical Decision Making, , vol. 11(3), pages 221-227, August.
    6. Marcus, George E. & MacKuen, Michael B., 1993. "Anxiety, Enthusiasm, and the Vote: The Emotional Underpinnings of Learning and Involvement During Presidential Campaigns," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(3), pages 672-685, September.
    7. Davis, Otto A. & Hinich, Melvin J. & Ordeshook, Peter C., 1970. "An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 64(2), pages 426-448, June.
    8. Wolfers, Justin, 2002. "Are Voters Rational? Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections," Research Papers 1730, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    9. Lupia,Arthur & McCubbins,Mathew D., 1998. "The Democratic Dilemma," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521585934, November.
    10. Carmines, Edward G. & Stimson, James A., 1980. "The Two Faces of Issue Voting," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 74(1), pages 78-91, March.
    11. Lupia,Arthur & McCubbins,Mathew D., 1998. "The Democratic Dilemma," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521584487, November.
    12. Slovic, Paul & Finucane, Melissa L. & Peters, Ellen & MacGregor, Donald G., 2007. "The affect heuristic," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 177(3), pages 1333-1352, March.
    13. Ted Brader, 2005. "Striking a Responsive Chord: How Political Ads Motivate and Persuade Voters by Appealing to Emotions," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 49(2), pages 388-405, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kaustav Das & Atisha Ghosh & Pushkar Maitra, 2021. "Exogenous Shocks and Electoral Outcomes: Re-examining the Rational Voter Hypothesis," Monash Economics Working Papers 2021-13, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    2. Patrick Flavin & Michael Keane, 2012. "Life Satisfaction and Political Participation: Evidence from the United States," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 63-78, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Prato, Carlo & Wolton, Stephane, 2014. "The Voters' Curses: The Upsides and Downsides of Political Engagement," MPRA Paper 53482, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. John Patty & Roberto Weber, 2007. "Letting the good times roll: A theory of voter inference and experimental evidence," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 130(3), pages 293-310, March.
    3. Brad R. Taylor, 2020. "The psychological foundations of rational ignorance: biased heuristics and decision costs," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 31(1), pages 70-88, March.
    4. Benjamin Ogden, 2017. "The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model," Working Papers ECARES ECARES 2017-20, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    5. Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde & João V. Ferreira, 2020. "Conflicted voters: A spatial voting model with multiple party identifications," Post-Print hal-02909682, HAL.
    6. Ariel Malka & Jon A. Krosnick & Gary Langer, 2009. "The Association of Knowledge with Concern About Global Warming: Trusted Information Sources Shape Public Thinking," Risk Analysis, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(5), pages 633-647, May.
    7. Asaad H. Almohammad, 2016. "Toward a Theory of Political Emotion Causation," SAGE Open, , vol. 6(3), pages 21582440166, August.
    8. Patrick Flavin & Michael Keane, 2012. "Life Satisfaction and Political Participation: Evidence from the United States," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 13(1), pages 63-78, March.
    9. Anders Gustafsson, 2019. "Busy doing nothing: why politicians implement inefficient policies," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 30(3), pages 282-299, September.
    10. David Altman, 2002. "Prospects for E-Government in Latin America: Satisfaction With Democracy, Social Accountability, and Direct Democracy," International Review of Public Administration, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(2), pages 5-20, December.
    11. Schnellenbach, Jan & Schubert, Christian, 2015. "Behavioral political economy: A survey," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 40(PB), pages 395-417.
    12. Donald Wittman, 2008. "Targeted political advertising and strategic behavior by uninformed voters," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 9(1), pages 87-100, January.
    13. James Tilley & Christopher Wlezien, 2008. "Does Political Information Matter? An Experimental Test Relating to Party Positions on Europe," Political Studies, Political Studies Association, vol. 56(1), pages 192-214, March.
    14. Matthijs Rooduijn & Brian Burgoon & Erika J van Elsas & Herman G van de Werfhorst, 2017. "Radical distinction: Support for radical left and radical right parties in Europe," European Union Politics, , vol. 18(4), pages 536-559, December.
    15. Bruno S. Frey & Alois Stutzer, "undated". "Direct Democracy: Designing a Living Constitution," IEW - Working Papers 167, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
    16. Gikas Hardouvelis & Dimitrios Thomakos, 2007. "Consumer Confidence and Elections," Working Papers 0003, University of Peloponnese, Department of Economics.
    17. Ecker-Ehrhardt, Matthias, 2013. "Why do they want the UN to decide? A two-step model of public support for UN authority," TranState Working Papers 171, University of Bremen, Collaborative Research Center 597: Transformations of the State.
    18. Matt Guardino & Suzanne Mettler, 2020. "Revealing the “Hidden welfare state†: How policy information influences public attitudes about tax expenditures," Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Center for Experimental and Behavioral Public Administration, vol. 3(1).
    19. Frey, Bruno S., 2004. "Direct Democracy for a Living Constitution," Freiburg Discussion Papers on Constitutional Economics 04/5, Walter Eucken Institut e.V..
    20. Johannes Urpelainen, 2012. "How Does Democratic Accountability Shape International Cooperation?," Conflict Management and Peace Science, Peace Science Society (International), vol. 29(1), pages 28-55, February.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:2034. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.